Dear Dr De Graaf,

We received now three reviews for your paper "A high resolution global scale groundwater model". The reviewers suggested major revision, with a focus on improving the readability and structure of the paper. Your responses to the three reviewers make me confident that a revised version of the paper will be suitable for publication in HESS. I suggest therefore to continue with the major revision on the basis of the reviewer comments.

Together with the updated version of the manuscript, please include again a reponse letter to the reviewer comments. Please indicate the changes you made to the manuscript including the new text with line numbers.

We look forward to the new version of your manuscript.

Best regards,

Harrie-Jan Hendricks-Franssen (editor)

Dear Inge De Graaf,

Finally three new reviews for the revised version of your manuscript "A high resolution global scale groundwater model" are available. Unfortunately, one reviewer delayed the review process considerably. The three reviewers suggest minor revision/technical corrections. Their comments concern especially the presentation of the material in the manuscript. The readability of the manuscript has to be improved and the explanation of the methodology also has to be improved in some places.

Please submit a new version of your manuscript taking into account the comments by the reviewers. This new version of the manuscript will only be subjected to review by the editor so that I expect that this revision/review round should not take much time.

The revision should contain a response to each of the comments from the reviewers and explain how the comment was handled. If you disagree with a comment, please explain why. If the text was modified as a response to a comment, please indicate how the text was modified, including the new text and its position in the manuscript.

I am looking forward to the new version of your manuscript.

Best regards,

Harrie-Jan Hendricks Franssen – Editor –

Dear Inge de Graaaf,

The revision of your manuscript "A high resolution global scale groundwater model" has been re-reviewed by the editor. The paper can be published after some technical corrections which are listed below. In addition, I raised a few additional questions which can, but does not have to be handled in the revised version of the paper.

Congratulations and best regards,

Harrie-Jan Hendricks-Franssen (handling editor)


P2, L2. "abstr": to be skipped.

P3, L13. skip "flows".

P3, L16. change to: "groundwater helps to sustain".

P4, L14. change to: "an upper unconfined aquifer".

P5, L23: add a space before "soil conditions".

P11, L10: rephrase sentence.

P13, L1: could uncertainty of riverbed conductivity also be important? Question can be handled, if authors wish.

P14, L21. change to: "maps of coefficients of variation".

P15, L8: change to: "specific discharge".

P15, L15-L16: why is water availability increased? In other basins it is
decreased? Question can be handled, if authors wish.

P16, L6. change to: "control of groundwater depth".

P16, L11. make singular-plural consistent.

P17, L16-L17. make singular-plural consistent.

P18, L25. change to: "such".

P18, L26. change to: "show".

P19, L1: 2 x are. skip one.

P19, L3. change to: "that are not captured".

P19, L11. reformulate "within acceptable accuracy".

Caption Figure 1. Reformulate last sentence. skip "figure".

Figure 7: median error is -16m or -26m. It would have been interesting if the paper would have elaborated more on this error. Is this a good result? In some cases errors are very large. How large would errors be if a very naive guess would have been made? For example: groundwater level is everywhere 20m below surface (or use median distance between groundwater level and land surface for this number, instead of 20). This would place the number more in a context, and in addition potential ways to improve model performance could be discussed or current limitations better evaluated. I missed a more thorough discussion of these errors in the paper. If the authors wish, they could handle this point, it is not needed for acceptance.