Dear authors,
Thank you very much for improving the paper according to the two quite critical reviewers. You have certainly made significant efforts to improve the paper and I consider it close to acceptance. The paper reports a valuable case study for a very important area related to groundwater resources development. However, I have the feeling that you provided a lot of explanations to many critical comments to particularly reviewer 2 that you have addressed in your reply, but that were not included in the revised paper. This can be justified in some cases, but we have to note that probably very few researchers will read your replies, but many more will read your paper that has to be a stand-alone complete contribution to the scientific literature. Thus, go one more time through both replies and check for relevant info that was not included yet in the paper.
Furthermore, please address the following points:
1. Start the Introduction with putting the study into a larger (scientific) picture; 1-2 paragraphs. Outline the current scientific challenges and report to previous work here and elsewhere that justify the problem statement of your study. Make explicit later in the Introduction what is not known so far that the reader sees your specific contributions to the knowledge gaps.
2. The first para in the Introduction is too long and contains too many different aspects. Structure the paper better. Start also a new para at line 117.
3. Which evaporation is shown in fig. 2? Potential E for which vegetation? Evaporation pan data?
4. Run spell check one more time. There are many small typos (also in the figures), note that there is always a space after a comma and before a bracket.

Stefan Uhlenbrook, UNESCO-IHE, The Netherlands

Dear authors,
the revisions were done accordingly and I would like to congratulate you to publish this paper. I hope it will have scientific and societal/environmnetal impact. Again, my apologies that the final decision took some weeks.
Regards,
Stefan Uhlenbrook, UNESCO-IHE, The Netherlands