the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
| 02 Apr 2024
Study on Multi-water Sources Allocation Based on Multi-scenario potential tapping under Extreme Drought: An Example from the Yellow River Water Supply Area in Henan
Abstract. The water supply of water resources allocation under extreme drought is insufficient, and the limited available water resources make it urgent to tap the potential of water supply. In this paper, the Yellow River water supply area in Henan Province is taken as an example to study the multi-water source allocation under extreme drought. According to the Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI), the extreme drought years are selected, and the water supply and demand balance in the extreme drought years is analyzed, and the water shortage degree of each water supply area is obtained. In this paper, unconventional water, flood resource utilization and elastic exploitation of groundwater are used as potential water sources. Different water supply scenarios are set up according to different potential tapping measures, and multi-scenario supply increase under extreme drought is explored. A multi-water source allocation model with the goal of minimizing water shortage is constructed, and a multi-scenario supply increase allocation scheme is proposed, which provides a basis for the study of water supply increase allocation to alleviate the drought degree of the the Yellow River Water Supply Area in Henan. Through the Multi-scenario potential tapping of multiple water sources, the existing potential water volume can be maximized, which is conducive to reducing the water supply pressure and water use restrictions of conventional water sources, improving the support capacity and guarantee capacity of water resources, and reducing the economic and social development bottlenecks caused by extreme drought.
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RC1: 'Comment on nhess-2024-31', Anonymous Referee #1, 27 Apr 2024
Review of “Study on Multi-water Sources Allocation Based on Multi-scenario potential tapping under Extreme Drought: An Example from the Yellow River Water Supply Area in Henan” by Wan et al.
General comments:
The study assessed the potential to optimise water supply allocation during extreme drought years in the Yellow River Basin. Specifically, three water supply scenarios were created to optimise different management measures in order to minimise water shortages. The water supply scenarios aimed to explore the potential for rainwater harvesting, water storage and groundwater abstraction (i.e. “unconventional” sources) to supplement surface water abstraction (i.e. “conventional” sources) during an extreme drought year (2010). The authors provided interesting insights into the measures to mitigate drought impacts and maximise water supply security, including considering sustainable and equitable water use across sectors.
However, whilst the topic is relevant to NEHSS and the wider implications of the main results could be an important contribution to improving water resources management, the paper requires a clearer structure, a more comprehensive description of the methods and a more critical discussion of the results. I would therefore recommend major revisions before this paper can be reconsidered for publication. To improve the paper, I would suggest including distinct methods and results sections to make clear which sections of the paper are results generated by the authors and which sections are information taken from secondary sources. Additionally, it is unclear from the paper how the water supply scenarios were modelled, how the water resources allocation model is parameterised and how the scenarios are applied. A number of major and additional comments (denoted by line numbers) are further presented below. I hope my comments will help the authors improve their paper.
- Methods - There should be a Methods section clearly detailing the definition of each scenario and exactly how these scenarios are defined within the water resource allocation model. It is hard to decipher how the various equations presented fit together - perhaps a flow chart could help here to illustrate the various inputs, outputs, model parameters and what, if any, algorithms were used to solve for the optimal water resources allocation. There is mention of the genetic algorithm used to optimise the model solution in the Discussion section but that information should ideally be placed in a methods section and explained more fully. The authors could also consider providing details on whether the model has been tested or validated in the methods section. I would also appreciate more information on how the water supply scenarios were modelled (e.g. were the model coefficients presented varied in some ways to represent the specifications of each scenario?).
- Results – The results from this paper seems to be Table 7, which shows the water availability for each sector and each scenario after solving the water resources allocation model. However, this section is very short with limited description of the main results. Table 8 compares the scenario results with actual water resources availability during 2010 but this is just a repetition of what is already shown in Table 7. Instead of a large table like Table 7, perhaps some figures summarising the results visually would be helpful and could replace repeated information in Table 8. The inclusion of water demand satisfaction estimation in Table 10 is interesting and seems novel but it is not explained in the paper how water demand satisfaction is estimated, how water demand is considered in each of the scenarios and how they are included in the water resources allocation model.
- Discussion – This section is very short and there is very limited discussion of how the results fit with the wider literature on drought mitigation measures (such as relevant studies in nature-based solutions for drought mitigation) in the wider region and/or globally. While I appreciate that findings often differ between studies due to different methods and spatial scales, there should be much more critical discussion of how your results relate to the wider scientific literature in drought management. Additionally, there is no discussion of possible sources of uncertainties associated with the water resources allocation model. For example, the authors could consider providing some discussion of the assumptions of the model and how that may influence the reliability of the results.
Additional comments:
L38 – please explain what you mean by “uneven water cycle”. This does not seem to be consistent with the language used by the IPCC.
L49 – this is the first time “unconventional water resources” are used in the text. “Conventional” and “unconventional” should be introduced, perhaps with examples, from the start. For example, the section from L172-182 explaining rainwater harvesting, reclaimed water, water storage capacity and groundwater abstraction should be placed much earlier.
L56-91 – instead of listing out studies one after the other, it would be more insightful if you identified common themes, methods and findings from previous studies which motivated the study aims.
L129 – “drought change of the PDSI annual sequence” – do you mean drought occurrence?
L138 – “every 10 or so” – is this referring to years?
L140 – drought severity rather than “grade” might be clearer.
L144-145 – repetition of L139
L183 – What do you mean by “water richness” and how is it quantified?
L183 – As noted in general comments, it is not clear from the text what “tapping” means – do you mean the different scenarios are tested adopted depending on groundwater abundance of the region? Both “tapping” and “digging” potential are used throughout the text but neither terms are properly defined – are they different concepts or do they refer to the same thing?
Table 4 – What does q and Q stand for in the table? The relevance of this table is not clear and it is unclear how it relates to the water supply scenarios listed in Table 5.
Table 6 – Does this table report results obtained from the study or are they values taken from secondary sources.
Section 3.2 – Did the authors come up with the water demand hierarchy themselves? If not, there should be appropriate reference to previous studies which have applied similar concepts.
L264 – what does “enemy” mean?
Open research section – are these meant to be hyperlinks to the data source? If so, the links don’t seem to be working.
Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-2024-31-RC1 -
AC1: 'Reply on RC1', Yu Wang, 14 May 2024
The comment was uploaded in the form of a supplement: https://nhess.copernicus.org/preprints/nhess-2024-31/nhess-2024-31-AC1-supplement.pdf
-
RC2: 'Comment on nhess-2024-31', Anonymous Referee #2, 11 May 2024
Wan and co-authors developed a multi-source water allocation model to evaluate the integration of alternative water supply sources under multiple drought scenarios. They developed and implemented this model for the Yellow River in the Hennan province of China. The topic is a good fit for NHESS but the manuscript needs considerable improvement before being suitable for publication. Key areas for improvement include description and citation of the data used, additional details on the model development and configuration, and clear concise writing throughout. In revising the paper it might be helpful to think of a student or early career researcher looking to apply similar methods to their project as the reader.
Comments
- Little information is provided about the data used in this work. What soil variables were used? Are there any data gaps in the time series data for temperature and precipitation? If so, what percent of the data is missing and how were gaps filled? Additionally, please cite the sources for each variable in the data or set of variables used in this work. A table would be an efficient way to present this information. See for example Table 1 in Garcia and Islam (2021).
- Figure 2 is labeled a histogram but is not in fact a histogram. Histograms have the variable magnitude on the x axis and the frequency on the y axis. It is a diagram consisting of bars of even width whose height is proportional to the frequency of a variable. Figure 2 is a time series bar graph. Please see Hesel et al. (2020) for additional guidance on data visualization.
- The scenarios developed to augment water supplies during drought years include use of harvested rainwater, wastewater recovery, flood water recovery and groundwater. As described in Table 6, these scenarios assume that a specific amount of water will be available from these water sources will be available during those drought years. How has this been determined? For example, expanding the reservoir and changing the operating rules does increase the probability of carrying over water from high flow years to extreme drought years but it depends on the sequence of flows observed. What analysis was conducted to establish that this volume could be stored? With what probability will it be available? Similarly, precipitation will be lower during extreme drought conditions so how reliable will the harvested rainwater be? What storage capacity and use rules are needed to have this amount of water available from rainwater harvesting with high reliability? Lastly, depending on the local hydro-geological conditions, groundwater levels and flow rates may decline during drought. Are all aquifers in this watershed unaffected by drought?
- It is not clear how the model developed addresses the spatial variation in water demands and supplies. Can these alternate water sources be developed to the same degree in all regions? Is sufficient water available in the correct locations to fully meet demands? If not, what infrastructure assumptions are made?
- The methods description leave me with many questions about the model is set up and run. Have the authors used streamflow from only 2010 for the optimization? How were initial conditions such as reservoir levels determined where considering reservoir expansions and changing operating rules? Is demand assumed to be constant at 2010 levels? Is the model fully deterministic or are there stochastic elements? What software or programming language was used to implement the model? What algorithm was used for optimization?
Minor Comments
- The sentence starting on line 40 (“In recent years…”) is not a complete sentence. Please review and revise.
- The use of the word “staged” in describing drought occurrence (see line 43 for example) is not appropriate because to stage means to produce or arrange and it implies human control while drought is a (mostly) natural phenomena. You could use the verb occurred in place of staged.
- What is meant by the “social economy” on line 44? Is this different that the economy?
- What is the elastic exploitation of groundwater? In particular, what does elastic mean here? Please clarify for the reader.
- The sentence starting on line 58 continues until line 74. It’s hard to follow. Please consider breaking this up into multiple sentences.
- Many acronyms are introduced in the introduction and not later used such as MS-MPC, UDN, etc. Please only introduce an acronym if it will be repeatedly used.
- What is the definition of “tapping potential”? I am not familiar with this term and do not think it is commonly used in water resource engineering.
- What does mu refer to on line 106 and 107? It looks like a unit, but I am not familiar with this unit or its abbreviation.
- What does it mean for precipitation to be unbalanced spatially and temporally? (As on lines 108-109)? Do you mean that there is high spatial and temporal variability?
- There are a number of instances where spaces between words are missing. For example, after the word “areas” on line 112.
- I am curious about the increase in ecological water use mentioned on line 113. What has driven the increase in ecological water use? Is this a legal or regulatory requirement?
- Table 1 is not needed as knowledge of these subdivisions is not needed by the reader to interpret the results.
- Line 139 refers to mild and normal drought years. These terms are not the ones defined in Table 2. For clarity, please use the terms defined.
- In Figure 3, outline each of the geographic areas. In the current figure some colors (drought levels) are outlined while others are not.
- What does water-rich zoning refer to on line 183? This is not a common term so please explain to the reader.
- Do both criteria in Table 4 need to be satisfied for the classification? How are cases where the two criteria are not aligned dealt with?
- In Table 6, what does “digging potential” mean? Is this the baseline scenario? Also in Table 6, all scenarios are labeled Scenario 1.
- In the Zp definition on line 264, who or what is the enemy?
- There is no i in equation 1. What does variable i on line 265 refer to?
- Can the variables introduced in equations 2 through 5 be labeled in a more intuitive way? For example, WG is total water while WB is groundwater and WT is ecological water. If WG were groundwater, WT total water and so forth, the variable definitions would be easier to remember.
- On line 300, should D0 read De?
References
Garcia, M., & Islam, S. (2021). Water stress & water salience: implications for water supply planning. Hydrological Sciences Journal, 66(6), 919-934.
Helsel, D.R., Hirsch, R.M., Ryberg, K.R., Archfield, S.A., and Gilroy, E.J., (2020). Chapter 2: Graphical Analysis. Statistical methods in water resources: U.S. Geological Survey Techniques and Methods, book 4, chap. A3, 458 p., https://doi.org/10.3133/tm4a3.
Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-2024-31-RC2 -
AC2: 'Reply on RC2', Yu Wang, 07 Jun 2024
The comment was uploaded in the form of a supplement: https://nhess.copernicus.org/preprints/nhess-2024-31/nhess-2024-31-AC2-supplement.pdf
Status: closed
-
RC1: 'Comment on nhess-2024-31', Anonymous Referee #1, 27 Apr 2024
Review of “Study on Multi-water Sources Allocation Based on Multi-scenario potential tapping under Extreme Drought: An Example from the Yellow River Water Supply Area in Henan” by Wan et al.
General comments:
The study assessed the potential to optimise water supply allocation during extreme drought years in the Yellow River Basin. Specifically, three water supply scenarios were created to optimise different management measures in order to minimise water shortages. The water supply scenarios aimed to explore the potential for rainwater harvesting, water storage and groundwater abstraction (i.e. “unconventional” sources) to supplement surface water abstraction (i.e. “conventional” sources) during an extreme drought year (2010). The authors provided interesting insights into the measures to mitigate drought impacts and maximise water supply security, including considering sustainable and equitable water use across sectors.
However, whilst the topic is relevant to NEHSS and the wider implications of the main results could be an important contribution to improving water resources management, the paper requires a clearer structure, a more comprehensive description of the methods and a more critical discussion of the results. I would therefore recommend major revisions before this paper can be reconsidered for publication. To improve the paper, I would suggest including distinct methods and results sections to make clear which sections of the paper are results generated by the authors and which sections are information taken from secondary sources. Additionally, it is unclear from the paper how the water supply scenarios were modelled, how the water resources allocation model is parameterised and how the scenarios are applied. A number of major and additional comments (denoted by line numbers) are further presented below. I hope my comments will help the authors improve their paper.
- Methods - There should be a Methods section clearly detailing the definition of each scenario and exactly how these scenarios are defined within the water resource allocation model. It is hard to decipher how the various equations presented fit together - perhaps a flow chart could help here to illustrate the various inputs, outputs, model parameters and what, if any, algorithms were used to solve for the optimal water resources allocation. There is mention of the genetic algorithm used to optimise the model solution in the Discussion section but that information should ideally be placed in a methods section and explained more fully. The authors could also consider providing details on whether the model has been tested or validated in the methods section. I would also appreciate more information on how the water supply scenarios were modelled (e.g. were the model coefficients presented varied in some ways to represent the specifications of each scenario?).
- Results – The results from this paper seems to be Table 7, which shows the water availability for each sector and each scenario after solving the water resources allocation model. However, this section is very short with limited description of the main results. Table 8 compares the scenario results with actual water resources availability during 2010 but this is just a repetition of what is already shown in Table 7. Instead of a large table like Table 7, perhaps some figures summarising the results visually would be helpful and could replace repeated information in Table 8. The inclusion of water demand satisfaction estimation in Table 10 is interesting and seems novel but it is not explained in the paper how water demand satisfaction is estimated, how water demand is considered in each of the scenarios and how they are included in the water resources allocation model.
- Discussion – This section is very short and there is very limited discussion of how the results fit with the wider literature on drought mitigation measures (such as relevant studies in nature-based solutions for drought mitigation) in the wider region and/or globally. While I appreciate that findings often differ between studies due to different methods and spatial scales, there should be much more critical discussion of how your results relate to the wider scientific literature in drought management. Additionally, there is no discussion of possible sources of uncertainties associated with the water resources allocation model. For example, the authors could consider providing some discussion of the assumptions of the model and how that may influence the reliability of the results.
Additional comments:
L38 – please explain what you mean by “uneven water cycle”. This does not seem to be consistent with the language used by the IPCC.
L49 – this is the first time “unconventional water resources” are used in the text. “Conventional” and “unconventional” should be introduced, perhaps with examples, from the start. For example, the section from L172-182 explaining rainwater harvesting, reclaimed water, water storage capacity and groundwater abstraction should be placed much earlier.
L56-91 – instead of listing out studies one after the other, it would be more insightful if you identified common themes, methods and findings from previous studies which motivated the study aims.
L129 – “drought change of the PDSI annual sequence” – do you mean drought occurrence?
L138 – “every 10 or so” – is this referring to years?
L140 – drought severity rather than “grade” might be clearer.
L144-145 – repetition of L139
L183 – What do you mean by “water richness” and how is it quantified?
L183 – As noted in general comments, it is not clear from the text what “tapping” means – do you mean the different scenarios are tested adopted depending on groundwater abundance of the region? Both “tapping” and “digging” potential are used throughout the text but neither terms are properly defined – are they different concepts or do they refer to the same thing?
Table 4 – What does q and Q stand for in the table? The relevance of this table is not clear and it is unclear how it relates to the water supply scenarios listed in Table 5.
Table 6 – Does this table report results obtained from the study or are they values taken from secondary sources.
Section 3.2 – Did the authors come up with the water demand hierarchy themselves? If not, there should be appropriate reference to previous studies which have applied similar concepts.
L264 – what does “enemy” mean?
Open research section – are these meant to be hyperlinks to the data source? If so, the links don’t seem to be working.
Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-2024-31-RC1 -
AC1: 'Reply on RC1', Yu Wang, 14 May 2024
The comment was uploaded in the form of a supplement: https://nhess.copernicus.org/preprints/nhess-2024-31/nhess-2024-31-AC1-supplement.pdf
-
RC2: 'Comment on nhess-2024-31', Anonymous Referee #2, 11 May 2024
Wan and co-authors developed a multi-source water allocation model to evaluate the integration of alternative water supply sources under multiple drought scenarios. They developed and implemented this model for the Yellow River in the Hennan province of China. The topic is a good fit for NHESS but the manuscript needs considerable improvement before being suitable for publication. Key areas for improvement include description and citation of the data used, additional details on the model development and configuration, and clear concise writing throughout. In revising the paper it might be helpful to think of a student or early career researcher looking to apply similar methods to their project as the reader.
Comments
- Little information is provided about the data used in this work. What soil variables were used? Are there any data gaps in the time series data for temperature and precipitation? If so, what percent of the data is missing and how were gaps filled? Additionally, please cite the sources for each variable in the data or set of variables used in this work. A table would be an efficient way to present this information. See for example Table 1 in Garcia and Islam (2021).
- Figure 2 is labeled a histogram but is not in fact a histogram. Histograms have the variable magnitude on the x axis and the frequency on the y axis. It is a diagram consisting of bars of even width whose height is proportional to the frequency of a variable. Figure 2 is a time series bar graph. Please see Hesel et al. (2020) for additional guidance on data visualization.
- The scenarios developed to augment water supplies during drought years include use of harvested rainwater, wastewater recovery, flood water recovery and groundwater. As described in Table 6, these scenarios assume that a specific amount of water will be available from these water sources will be available during those drought years. How has this been determined? For example, expanding the reservoir and changing the operating rules does increase the probability of carrying over water from high flow years to extreme drought years but it depends on the sequence of flows observed. What analysis was conducted to establish that this volume could be stored? With what probability will it be available? Similarly, precipitation will be lower during extreme drought conditions so how reliable will the harvested rainwater be? What storage capacity and use rules are needed to have this amount of water available from rainwater harvesting with high reliability? Lastly, depending on the local hydro-geological conditions, groundwater levels and flow rates may decline during drought. Are all aquifers in this watershed unaffected by drought?
- It is not clear how the model developed addresses the spatial variation in water demands and supplies. Can these alternate water sources be developed to the same degree in all regions? Is sufficient water available in the correct locations to fully meet demands? If not, what infrastructure assumptions are made?
- The methods description leave me with many questions about the model is set up and run. Have the authors used streamflow from only 2010 for the optimization? How were initial conditions such as reservoir levels determined where considering reservoir expansions and changing operating rules? Is demand assumed to be constant at 2010 levels? Is the model fully deterministic or are there stochastic elements? What software or programming language was used to implement the model? What algorithm was used for optimization?
Minor Comments
- The sentence starting on line 40 (“In recent years…”) is not a complete sentence. Please review and revise.
- The use of the word “staged” in describing drought occurrence (see line 43 for example) is not appropriate because to stage means to produce or arrange and it implies human control while drought is a (mostly) natural phenomena. You could use the verb occurred in place of staged.
- What is meant by the “social economy” on line 44? Is this different that the economy?
- What is the elastic exploitation of groundwater? In particular, what does elastic mean here? Please clarify for the reader.
- The sentence starting on line 58 continues until line 74. It’s hard to follow. Please consider breaking this up into multiple sentences.
- Many acronyms are introduced in the introduction and not later used such as MS-MPC, UDN, etc. Please only introduce an acronym if it will be repeatedly used.
- What is the definition of “tapping potential”? I am not familiar with this term and do not think it is commonly used in water resource engineering.
- What does mu refer to on line 106 and 107? It looks like a unit, but I am not familiar with this unit or its abbreviation.
- What does it mean for precipitation to be unbalanced spatially and temporally? (As on lines 108-109)? Do you mean that there is high spatial and temporal variability?
- There are a number of instances where spaces between words are missing. For example, after the word “areas” on line 112.
- I am curious about the increase in ecological water use mentioned on line 113. What has driven the increase in ecological water use? Is this a legal or regulatory requirement?
- Table 1 is not needed as knowledge of these subdivisions is not needed by the reader to interpret the results.
- Line 139 refers to mild and normal drought years. These terms are not the ones defined in Table 2. For clarity, please use the terms defined.
- In Figure 3, outline each of the geographic areas. In the current figure some colors (drought levels) are outlined while others are not.
- What does water-rich zoning refer to on line 183? This is not a common term so please explain to the reader.
- Do both criteria in Table 4 need to be satisfied for the classification? How are cases where the two criteria are not aligned dealt with?
- In Table 6, what does “digging potential” mean? Is this the baseline scenario? Also in Table 6, all scenarios are labeled Scenario 1.
- In the Zp definition on line 264, who or what is the enemy?
- There is no i in equation 1. What does variable i on line 265 refer to?
- Can the variables introduced in equations 2 through 5 be labeled in a more intuitive way? For example, WG is total water while WB is groundwater and WT is ecological water. If WG were groundwater, WT total water and so forth, the variable definitions would be easier to remember.
- On line 300, should D0 read De?
References
Garcia, M., & Islam, S. (2021). Water stress & water salience: implications for water supply planning. Hydrological Sciences Journal, 66(6), 919-934.
Helsel, D.R., Hirsch, R.M., Ryberg, K.R., Archfield, S.A., and Gilroy, E.J., (2020). Chapter 2: Graphical Analysis. Statistical methods in water resources: U.S. Geological Survey Techniques and Methods, book 4, chap. A3, 458 p., https://doi.org/10.3133/tm4a3.
Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-2024-31-RC2 -
AC2: 'Reply on RC2', Yu Wang, 07 Jun 2024
The comment was uploaded in the form of a supplement: https://nhess.copernicus.org/preprints/nhess-2024-31/nhess-2024-31-AC2-supplement.pdf
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