Review of "Exploring the transition between water and wind-dominated landscapes in Deep Springs, California as an analog for transitioning landscapes on Mars"

General:

The importance of this paper stems from the author's ability to link monthly and yearly weather data and changes in the landscape to long-lived wet and dry changes on Mars. Most terrestrial studies related to Mars were on a larger timescale, i.e., thousands or millions of years. The work is clearly novel, well-written, and perfectly appropriate for publication in ESURF after considering the following minor suggestions.

• A very interesting point in this work is that the authors found that Deep Springs lost 2.77 m of equivalent water depth, which indicates a 494.2 m shoreline retreat. They then concluded that the drying was net and that a complete drying could occur within the next few years.I wonder if the authors could extract a profile of the water changes over the past years to see whether the lake's drying occurs gradually or abruptly. I think this might be important for early Martian climate.
• Another point that could be interesting is that the Deep Springs occur over an arid zone, and the wet to arid geomorphic processes observed could be aligned with the recent studies that used paleolakes and valley network junction angles to infer that early Martian climate was likely arid to semi-arid (e.g., Stucky de Quay et al., 2020; Seybold et al., 2018). I would suggest calculating the aridity index of the region using rainfall and evapotranspiration. Then It would be great to build a discussion on whether the Martian playa lakes might have formed under arid to semi-arid climates.
• I would suggest mentioning in the introduction that this study examines the transition from wet to arid at monthly and yearly timescales. This is important because most of the terrestrial studies linked to understanding the Martian surface are on a bigger timescale, i.e., thousands or millions of years.
• Somewhere in the discussion, it would be valuable to mention some morphometric characteristics based on Earth analogs that define similar playa lakes on Mars. Maybe in the section of Deep Springs playa as an analog for Mars.

References

Stucky de Quay, G., Goudge, T. A., & Fassett, C. I. (2020). Precipitation and aridity constraints from paleolakes on early Mars. Geology, 48(12), 1189–1193. https://doi.org/10.1130/g47886.1

Seybold, H. J., Kite, E., & Kirchner, J. W. (2018). Branching geometry of valley networks on Mars and Earth and its implications for early Martian climate. Science Advances, 4(6). https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aar6692 

Review of egusphere-2022-1040

Exploring the transition between water and wind-dominated landscapes in Deep Springs, California as an analog for transitioning landscapes on Mars

This paper provides us with a novel dataset of monthly and yearly changes to a transitioning landscape that can be used as an analogue for Mars. The authors have thoroughly investigated their study site and share a comprehensive dataset. I provide line-by-line minor comments, mostly having to do with clarification of language.

Minor Comments:

Introduction

General: Somewhere in the introduction, I would highlight the temporal timescales of this study, as must Mars or Martian analogue studies consider much longer timescales. Having a monthly/yearly timestep is quite novel and should be highlighted.

Line 27: Suggested change to “When a single type of surface process dominates, the resulting landscape is well known; for example,  glaciers carve U-shaped valleys, wind creates dune fields, water causes meandering rivers, and so on”.

Line 29: Delete “both individually and in combination with”.

Line 36: The text states “However, such interactions are of critical importance to understanding climate change and process”. Do you mean to understanding how climate change affects or modifies the dominant geomorphological processes affecting a landscape? This sentence needs to be flushed out a bit more.

Line 37: Suggested addition to “On Mars, climate and atmospheric conditions were once similar to Earth”…

Line 64: Suggest changing “significantly” to “substantively”. You use 'significantly' later on in the paper (line 213) to refer to a statistically significant result.

Line 72: Please convert flow rate to metric

Line 72: Delete “provided”. Could change to “The flow rate calculated by Jones (1965)…”.

Line 83: Please convert feet to meters.

Methodology

Line 87: “Surface imaging”: Satellite surface imaging or field photos? You've qualified that you have 'drone images', so you might want to qualify this as well.

Line 105: Suggestion: Add (Figure 1) at the end of the sentence.

Line 107: ‘sediment traps’, not ‘sediments traps’.

Line 110: Suggestion: “However, when the stationary sediment traps…”

Line 112: Suggest having “fig. 1d” come after your first mention of MWACs.

Line 117: Suggest change from “collected during each visit o the field area” to “field site”, just for variety.

Line 120: Please spell out ‘frames per second’.

Line 120-121: Change “drone footage was taken 7 times” to “drone footage was collected…”

Line 124: Change “…and see if a change” to “evaluate if”.

Results

Line 186: Please confirm the temperature is in Celsius and not Fahrenheit?

Line 190: Only one C is necessary 😊

Line 216: For the first sentence, can you include the dates here? I know you just reported them, but there are a few dates floating around and this would help the reader know which 'monitoring period' is relevant.

Line 227: Suggested change for the sentence starting “In all…”: “Overall/Unfortunately, the resolution of the satellite images could not be used to confidently identify shoreline position.”

Line 231: Change “some region” to “various regions”.

Line 236: I was confused by your use of “maximum observed shoreline level”.  In lines 227-228, you state the satellite imagery couldn't confidently identify shoreline position. But here you suggest you can. In the lines above, do you mean you were unable to map the progression of shorelines? If that's the case, I would make that clearer. 

Line 239: Lake does not need to be capitolized.

Line 240: Change “in scale” to “across”.

Line 246-247: Suggested rewording: “Some of the crescent features were isolated, whereas others were touching or connected, and therefore not discrete forms (Fig. 3c-e).”

Line 247: Add comma after “high resolution image”.

Line 251: Delete ‘field’

Line 252: Change “observed” to “documented” – you used ‘observed’ in the previous sentence.

Line 252: Start a new sentence at “In between”.

Line 255: Suggested rewording “Crescent features resembling those identified and measured in 2013…”

Line 256-257: Suggested rewording: “Whereas the crescent features observed in 2013 satellite imagery were bright toned, these the 2021 features match the surrounding muddy surface…”. Adding the years helped me follow the narrative a bit better.

Line 263: observed how? In situ/drone/satellite?

Line 267/Line 272: Change “on foot” to “in situ”.

Line 273: change “greater in height” to “taller”.

Line 277 onward: Suggested change: “It is unclear when these springs become active or inactive as the dark deposits around the springs can be seen throughout the year, but do not persist in the same location. Spring deposit diameters range in scale from a few centimeters to more than a meter across in, with larger features occurring further into the basin interior…”

Line 290: change “in thickness” to “thick”.

Line 293: Which lake? Or just don’t capitalize Lake.

Line 294: This is super picky and very pedantic, but you’ve spelled meter differently here. Meter is the US spelling, while -metre is the French/Canadian/UK spelling. I only noticed because I mix mine up as well.

Line 308: Change “…only small amounts of dust which were too insignificant to measure” to “trace amounts of dust”.

Line 313: what does “manual inspection” mean? In situ observations of the core materials?

Line 326: Suggest adding “…groundwater inputs”.

Discussion

Line 332: Associated

Line 353: Please convert mph to km/hr

Line 354: Threshold for motion for dry sand. I wonder how much more windspeed is needed for wet sand. Although, you have demonstrated there is no sand in the playa interior, but it's just something to think about

Line 353: Suggest adding “Straight-crested, and with centimeter…”.

Line 369: Delete “ever”

Line 395: Suggest changing to “has not changed over roughly the past 100 years”.

Line 400: This was a very interesting section.

Line 480: Careful with definitive language like “must have dried and become a salt pan…”. It did dry (obviously), but may not have become a salt pan. This is a nit-picky comment, I realize, but did want to share.

Line 499: Change to “aeolian dune-like surface morphology”

Line 507: “The observations from this work…”.