Dear authors,
as you have seen, the three reviewers provided very detailed comments and raised a couple of critical concerns, most of which i share. the manuscript, in spite of adressing a highly interesting topic, remains relatively difficult to read, in particular for person not in detail familiar with the topic. i found especially the methods section incomplete and confusing in places. i would thus strongly encourage you to try and provide a more stringent, detailed and logical story line, which will help the reader to appreciate your interesting work. in addition, as also emphasized by the reviewers, quite some of the results remain qualitative. for the sake of precise scientific method and objectivity i think it will be necessary to provide quite some more quantification of your comparative results. you mentioned that you intend to use boxplots in the revised manuscript. this is already a step into the right direction but i would nevertheless invite you to additionally do formal statistical tests (anova, rank sum test or whatever is deemed suitable) to put actual numbers (i.e. p values) on the results.
I would be glad to receive a revised version of the manuscript, in detail addressing all reviewer comments.
best regards, markus hrachowitz

Dear authors,

thank you very much for the revised version of your manuscript, which has been greatly improved and largely addressed the previous reviewer comments. i think it is a very interesting contribution to literature and may raise some interest in the community.
i will be glad to accept the manuscript for publication after you addressed a couple of minor, technical points raised by the reviewers:

The authors have provided responses to the vast majority of the reviewers' comments and carried out substantial revisions to the manuscript. As a result, even if I still find the manuscript a bit hard to read, it is substantially improved and may be accepted for publication, provided that the authors address some minor revisions needed. These revisions are linked to a small number of grammatical and/or typographic errors (see below).
-Abstract: “Climate change is expected to change the water cycle”. I would suggest replacing the second “change” with “impact” or “modify”.
-Pag. 26, line 6: “often in addition to elevated” – remove “often”
-Pag. 26, line 29: “First” should be “first”
-Pag. 26, line 12-13: “…only few studies focus on forest ecosystems or take a closer look at drought impacts on soils where often only soil moisture is observed (Ozolinčius 12 et al.., 2009,; Albert et al.., 2011,; Glaser et al.., 2013)”. According to the response to reviewers, this should be “…only few studies focus on forest ecosystems or take a closer look at drought impacts on soils where often only soil moisture is observed to change and no variations in other soil properties are monitored (Ozolinčius et 34 al., 2009; Albert et al., 2011; Glaser et al., 2013).”
-Pag. 33, lines 4-6: “the reverse moisture…in the data”. This is a bit confusing, please provide other plausible explanations, rather than hydraulic redistribution (since you say you did not find any sign of hydraulic redistribution).
-Fig. 4: for completeness, add in the caption the time period over which the cumulative soil moisture is computed

best regards, markus hrachowitz