Dear Dr Kumar,

Your manuscript “Evaluating the utility of satellite soil moisture retrievals over irrigated areas and the ability of land data assimilation methods to correct for unmodeled processes” has been subjected now to review by two reviewers. The reviewers think that the paper is of interest to HESS, but before publication in HESS a number of issues has to be clarified. This concerns especially the discussion of limitations of this study and an extension of the literature review (bias correction methods, land surface models which handle irrigation, for example). As both reviewers recommend major revision, I recommend you to change the manuscript a bit more thoroughly than you announced in the response letters. Your response letters point towards a planned minor revision only.

In your answer to the main points and detailed comments, please indicate how comments have been handled exactly, indicating also whether text has been deleted and what the position of newly included text blocks is. I am looking forward to the new version of the paper, which will again be subjected to review by the original two reviewers.

Best regards,

Harrie-Jan Hendricks Franssen - editor -

Dear Dr Kumar,

The revised version of your paper "Evaluating the utility of satellite soil moisture retrievals over irrigated areas and the ability of land data assimilation methods to correct for unmodeled processes" was subjected to review by one of the original reviewers. I also went through your answers to the reviewers and the revised paper. I am happy that after a few very minor technical corrections the paper can be published.

Best regards,

Harrie-Jan Hendricks Franssen


Technical corrections:
P2, L6: "modification" instead of modifications"
P4, L11: "soil moisture" instead of "soil moistures"
P19, L2: "soil moisture" instead of "soil moistures"
P19, L3: 2x "the"
Caption Figure 1: Termination point after first sentence lacking.