I ask the Authors to take care of the reviewers comments. Even if the paper is focused on the experimental set up and methods, they introduce some modeling aspects in the paper that deserves some further attention. Therefore, I think that it is important for the final acceptance of the paper that the concerns raised by both reviewers are adequately answered.

I ask the Authors to take care of the reviewers comments. Even if the paper is focused on the experimental set up and methods, they introduce some modeling aspects in the paper that deserves some further attention. Therefore, I think that it is important for the final acceptance of the paper that the concerns raised by both reviewers are adequately answered.


In addition, some clarification from you regarding your request 'modelling aspects in the paper that deserves some further attention' would be very useful. We assume this is primarily with regard to our response to Reviewer 1?If not please clarify which aspects of Reviewer 2's comments you feel need further elaboration.

I was referring mainly to the last remark in the general comments of reviewer #2:
"One of the conclusions of the paper is that the modelling enabled aspects of the physical properties of the two domains to be inferred. Moreover, the model fitting is shown to be relatively insensitive to the model parameters; can this fact weaken the former conclusion?"

In terms of our response to Reviewer 1, we believe their suggestion of applying an analytical model in this context is not a useful one as there are no tractable solutions we're aware of which adequately deal with this problem. Furthermore, we do not agree with the reviewer that a method should be judged by its ease of use - the complexity must necessarily match the physics of the problem. However, to accommodate the reviewer's concern we can add additional commentary in the text regarding the inherent uncertainties in fitting simple analytical models to continuous breakthrough curves which, without the interrupted flow phases, would leave the physical properties of the system very poorly constrained. This will highlight more powerfully the use of the new method, while showing the lack in overly simple models. I hope this sounds like a reasonable approach to you for revising the text adequately?

I think that developing this argument in the paper would be a good way to reply to the reviewer #1's comments and to show the practical importance of the proposed method. The paper is devoted to the development of a method to improve the characterisation of porous media and I think the reader is waiting for a "practical" technique, so I suggest you not to underestimate this comment.

The paper has been improved with the last revision. However, the referees stressed some specific questions which still remain open and a few corrections on the notation.
I think that the authors can revise the paper to answer these complaints.

The referee raised a vey specific question and therefore I hope that the authors can submit a final version in short time.

The technical note is almost ready for publication. The authors provide a motivation for the missing data during the no-flow phase of the experiments ("To clarify, it would have been impossible to do as the Reviewer suggests as concentrations cannot be measured unless there is flow, and therefore effluent to collect for analysis"). I could not find this remark in the text, but I think it could help the reader to analyse the results and, therefore, I ask the authors to insert it in the final submission. Since this is the only change required to the technical note, there is no need for a further Editor's review.