Dear authors,

I read the manuscript and the comments by the reviewers. I think reviewer 2 is spot on with his/her comments. My findings in short are shown below and are in line with the comments of reviewer 2. The manuscript needs considerable work and adjustment to be publishable in HESS. You must make clear what the scientific contribution of the work is.

Please address all comments and make the appropriate changes and improvements before resubmission. After resubmission, the manuscript will be send out for review.

Sincerely,

Albrecht Weerts

My findings in short:

Abstract: no findings/results/conclusions are presented please adjust the abstract this may be related to the lack of focus in the manuscript
Line 21 open issue I think it not correct please rephrase
There is no hypothesis posed in the introduction please address, there seems to be lack of focus

Please adjust manuscript structure
Introduction
with hypothesis
Material & Methods
withOverview model
with Data sets
with Experimental setup to address hypothesis => including uncertainty analysis & calibration process

Results and Discussion
Conclusion

This is necessary to separate experimental setup from results and to get the hypothesis and results of the paper clearer. At this moment the hypothesis and proposed experimental setup to address the hypothesis are completely unclear.

The model overview seems incomplete, only discussing the snow melting module. I suggest moving the model description to an Appendix and keeping the model overview in the main part very small with references to earlier work (we don’t want to repeat it in the main part)

It is unclear why an uncertainty analysis is carried out, what is the goal (relationship to hypothesis). The choice of the GLUE based methods is unclear probably related to the unclear hypothesis ( see for instance at Rakovec et al WRR, 50, 409–426, doi:10.1002/2013WR014063,2014 for a more complete overview).

The choice of calibration methods stays unclear probably related to the unclear hypothesis.

Also the choice of verification/validation metrics stays unclear.

The conclusions are very general and seem to add little in terms of scientific contribution (related to missing hypothesis, lack of clear experimental setup etc).

Dear Authors,

Two reviewers re-assessed the manuscript and mention that the manuscript has improved considerably. However, they both have still issues that need clarification or improvement.

Beside the comments by the reviewers I also reassessed the manuscript and based on my findings I think you still need to do quite some work on rearranging the manuscript.

The manuscript needs further improvement regarding the seperation of methods and results.

Section 2.3 is a mixture which is unacceptable
And Part of chapter 3 page 19 line 3-20 and page 19 line 2330+page 20 line 1-2
and page 22 line 3-9 need to be merged with paragraph 2.4
to seperate the methods from the results

I advise to make re arrange according to
2 Material and Methods
2.1 Model Overview
2.2 Data sets
2.3 Experimental Setup
2.3.1) Uncertainty analysis
2.3.2) Calibration experiments
=> re arrange 2.4 + part of 3
2.3.3) Verification measures
- streamflow
- LST
- SWI
3 Results
3.1 Uncertainty analysis
3.2 Calibration Experiments
etc

Please also check the complete manuscript with a check on the use of past and present tense (for example page 10 2.3 I think should be in present tense)

Note that Discussion and conclusion has the wrong number
Page 23 line 13 what do you mean by encouraging ~ vague
Page 12 line 6 begins with .

Last but not least you now focus in the evaluation on NS and RMSE, CORR etc
I think besides this it would make sense to evaluate on peak flows as this is in many applications relevant

With kind regards,

Albrecht

Dear Authors,

Please remove line 14-22 on page 14 (you cannot start discussing results here)
Please rephrase line 23-24 page 14:
The calibration process is applied to the most sensitive and impacting parameters of the model (uc, uh, ct, cf) also used in the uncertainty analysis in 2.4.1.

Sincerely,

Albrecht Weerts