Measurements of the water balance components of a large green roof in the greater Paris area

Versini, Pierre-Antoine; Stanic, Filip; Gires, Auguste; Schertzer, Daniel; Tchiguirinskaia, Ioulia

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-12-1025-2020

Articles | Volume 12, issue 2

https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-12-1025-2020

© Author(s) 2020. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-12-1025-2020

© Author(s) 2020. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 12, issue 2

Data description paper

|

06 May 2020

Data description paper |

| 06 May 2020

Measurements of the water balance components of a large green roof in the greater Paris area

Pierre-Antoine Versini, Filip Stanic, Auguste Gires, Daniel Schertzer, and Ioulia Tchiguirinskaia

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Final revised paper (published on 06 May 2020)
Preprint (discussion started on 19 Nov 2019)

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

AC: Author comment | RC: Referee comment | SC: Short comment | EC: Editor comment

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- Supplement

RC1: 'Reviewer Comments', Anonymous Referee #1, 29 Nov 2019
- AC1: 'Answers to Referee 1 comments', Pierre-Antoine Versini, 20 Dec 2019
RC2: 'Review ESSD-2019-187', Anonymous Referee #2, 04 Feb 2020
- AC2: 'Answers to Referee 2 comments', Pierre-Antoine Versini, 11 Feb 2020

Peer-review completion

AR: Author's response | RR: Referee report | ED: Editor decision

AR by Pierre-Antoine Versini on behalf of the Authors (28 Feb 2020) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (02 Mar 2020) by David Carlson

RR by Anonymous Referee #1 (15 Mar 2020)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

The authors have made a reasonable attempt to address the reviewers’ comments. Modifications to Figure 1, inclusion of a cross-sectional sketch for the roof system and inclusion of an individual storm event have all improved the manuscript.
However, questions around the moisture probe calibration remain. The authors have provided an alternative calibration equation (Equation 4) which gives vastly different values of theta compared with Equation 3. For example, for ka = 10, the calculated value for theta are 0.188 and 0.347 for Equations (3) and (4) respectively. Given this difference, and the acknowledgement that Topp’s Equation may not be appropriate, it is unclear why the authors have chosen to use Equation 3 for the analysis presented in the paper. In Section 3.3. it is suggested that this leads to rainfall storage in excess of the recorded rainfall, which does not lead to reader confidence in the data. The analysis should be done using the substrate specific calibration, Equation 4.
In Figures 5 & 7, red and magenta lines are very difficult to distinguish between. A different colour combination should be used.
In line 255-257 the authors state that they were particularly interested in understanding the influence of the slope on infiltration and evapotranspiration processes. I do not see any comments in the paper relating to this, and the data plotted in Figure 6 does not permit specific moisture content probes to be identified. Please comment on whether any systematic variations in moisture content or the rate of moisture content reduction in dry periods (evapotranspiration processes) were observed as a function of the probe position, the local slope and the relative location top/bottom of the wave.
The paper also requires careful editing for English. Some examples of repeated errors are in the use of ‘performances’ rather than ‘performance’, ‘were comprised’ rather than ‘comprised’, and ‘coma’ rather than ‘comma’. The last line of the abstract is difficult to understand – maybe ‘conducting’ should be ‘affecting’? Also line 64.

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ED: Publish subject to technical corrections (24 Mar 2020) by David Carlson

AR by Pierre-Antoine Versini on behalf of the Authors (30 Mar 2020) Author's response Manuscript

Short summary

The Blue Green Wave of Champs-sur-Marne (1 ha, France) has been converted into a full-scale monitoring site devoted to studying the uses of green infrastructure in storm-water management. For this purpose, the components of the water balance have been monitored: rainfall, water content in the substrate, and discharge. These measurements are useful to better understand the processes (infiltration and retention) in hydrological performance and spatial variability.