Dear Claudia and colleagues,

sorry for a bit late response .... (I am in holidays in Greece now).

This is a nice paper, definitely worth to be published. You have been given 3 reviews, which I find all to be good and in-depth types of reviews. Thus, I recommend that you follow those reviews in the manner that you proposed in your response letter and than the paper will be ready for publication.
I have to admit that I found it a bit strange that you cite and briefly discuss applications to lowland regions with models made for catchments with topographic gradients (such as WASIM-ETH and SWAT), but did not mention there the work be Stefan Krause in the lowland region of the Lower Havel, where he applied a groundwater model (Modflow) coupled to an unsaturated zone module, (see e.g. Krause, S., Jacobs, J., Bronstert, A. (2007): Modelling the impacts of land-use and drainage density on the water balance of a lowland-floodplain landscape in Northeast Germany. Ecological Modelling, 200(3-4), 475-492). Also the pioneering work of Sophocleous on lowland / groundwater dominated catchments should be mentioned in this paper. I realize that you give some credit to those works in the accompanying gmd paper, but the applications results are worth to be mentioned here, as well.

In general I find that these concepts, which follow an intermediate / feasible approach between empirical concepts and fully Darcy/Richards approaches (like the one of, e.g., Maxwell and Kollet) have shown to be most successful for such catchment type. Your model fits into this type of intermediate, successful concepts.

Kind regards,
Axel Bronstert

Dear authors,

in the manuscript version uploaded today, I cannot see which changes you made responding on the reviewers' comments (I See only the little amendmend you did to my comment). Thus, please upload a version in the track changes mode and a report where you explain the way you responded to the reviewers' comments.

Thank you,

Axel