Dear authors

Thank you very much for engaging fully in the interactive discussion and replying comprehensively to the referees. The majority of the suggested revisions are minor and I am satisfied that your replies address the referee comments. I also note you have already taken action to revise the manuscript and have uploaded it as a supplement.

I consider the original manuscript suitable for publication in HESS pending minor revisions as suggested by the referees, and according to your attendant response in the online discussion.

The usual procedure is that you would now upload a revised manuscript. I appreciate you have done this already, but can I now ask you to do it using the upload facility (which you should soon get access to), so that you can upload the manuscript to the right place along with the other materials required (i.e. reply to reviewers, which can be the same as your online replies; and incorporating manuscript with track changes, or other highlighting, to make it clear where you have edited the manuscript).

I look forward to receiving the manuscript and other materials.

Best wishes
Jamie Hannaford
HYPER Droughts Special Issue Guest Editor

Dear authors
Firstly, I apologise for the unforeseen delay this last week in attending to this final decision.

Thank you for sending in your revised manuscript. Thank you also for attending to the reviewers comments so thoroughly, and sending in a very comprehensive response with detailed reference to changes. I am satisfied you have answered the reviewer comments appropriately and I can recommend publication in HESS.

In the course of reading your response I identified a number of (minor) technical corrections, mostly grammatical, which can be attended to when submitting the final files.
I would also recommend you submit all of the additional figures, currently listed as appendices, as a supplement. For the purposes of keeping your main article more accessible (and managing file size and number of pages) I suggest you upload these figures as a separate PDF file of supplementary information labelled S1, S2 etc

Best wishes
Jamie Hannaford

P3, L95 – Blue water could also involve storage in groundwater; please qualify the useage as applied in your paper as opposed to general definitions (with references would be best)
P4, L125. This sounded better previously (‘assessment of the sensitivity of water scarcity events to….’)
P4, L130 – 139. I appreciate you have tried to condense but I think it is a shame to lose the concise overview of the approach, which helps give a general picture before the detail of each aspect.
P7, L227 - 230 – there is a grammar problem around here, these sentences need attention. There is a long list of studies and then the sentence runs onto “applied this in a WTA-ratio…”
P9, L311 - 313. Grammar. Would probably be better as ‘whilst for consumptive water use we found….’. Also here ‘significantly’ should just be ‘significant’.
P13, L462. This should be ‘senses’ (plural) or ‘both in an absolute and a relative sense’.
P14, L478. Should be factor of 2.
P14, L479 – L481. ‘Rather unchanged’ is not the best term. Perhaps ‘broadly’ or ‘relatively’ unchanged.
P14, L488. ‘Under for’ needs changing (remove under)
P17, L585. Univocal is strictly OK, but not in practice that widely used. I would recommend either ‘unequivocal’ or ‘unambigous’ or even ‘unidirectional’. But you could also use monotonic?
P17, P587. I completely agree with the importance of lag-time due to soil memory confounding direct relationships, but I don’t think here that you have really answered the reviewers comment, by just referring to ‘the ability of the soil to remember’. This just another use of the term memory/remember which after all is used metaphorically anyway. It would be worth explaining in a bit more detail (i.e. the persistence of storage anomalies over time that leads to time lag and attenuation of meteorological signals). Your reply to the reviewer contains some contextual material that could be added here to add clarity, as its an important point so worth fleshing out.
P17, 612. Add a ‘the’ before Potential.
P17, 612. I would suggest: ‘….added value of adaptation measures targeted towards mitigating the impacts of….”
P17, L615. I think this would be better as ‘…naturalized flows, so reservoirs or inter-basin transfers have not yet been taken into account.’
P18, 622. I think extrapolate is the wrong word here; suggest ‘exacerbate’ or ‘amplify’ or similar.
P18, 624. ‘More frequent’ would probably be better.
P18, 628. ‘Appointed’ not quite the right term, ’Identified’ would be better.
P18, L630. Change from ‘found correlations’ to ‘correlations found’ (or ‘observed correlations’)
P18, L639. Consists would be better than constitutes. (or just remove the ‘of’)
P18, L640. “European weather systems” is very vague – would be better to state some examples of particular ocean-atmospheric teleconnections