The manuscript deals with an important topic and the basic of this study has a good scientific flow. The reviewers however have major comments that must be addressed and improved, such as shortening the manuscript and provide clarifications as well as others, as detailed in the reviewers reports. I ask the authors to carefully read those reports and address those comments in the revised manuscript.

I have read the revised paper, and examined the author response to the two reviewers comments. Although the paper was improved it still needs more revisions.

1) In the first round, reviewer #1 pointed out that the paper is too long and "heavy". I am afraid the revised version still has this problem. The authors should put more efforts in make the paper much more concise. See the comment below in this regard.

2) Often, the authors describe in details the changes from decade to decade of different variables, which is a repeat of the data presented for example in Table 2. I do not see the point of this, as all info is in the table. The authors should concisely point only to important features. This will help shortening the paper.

3) In view of one of reviewer #2 comments, I propose to add information on the sediment load measurement technique, its reliability, and some details on what is actually measured.

4) I would like to ask the authors to confirm the significance of all their statistical tests (p-value is always reported as lower than the selected significance level, i.e. all trends are significant). I cannot be sure, but it seems that the signal of the trend of precipitation for example presented in figure 7 is much smaller than the "noise", i.e., precipitation variability. Please recheck the p-value for this and other statistical tests presented.

5) L 107 - add "potential" before evaporation.

6) Some language editing is needed.

All comments were addressed (although I think the paper could be shorten even more). The paper is acceptable for publication.