Dear authors,

Thank you very much for your responses to the review comments. The referees suggest minor revisions, and I believe the modifications you propose are appropriate in response.

I look forward to seeing a revised version of the manuscript for consideration for HESS.

Best regards
Jamie Hannaford
Guest Editor, HYPER Droughts Special Issue

Dear Authors,

Thank you for taking the time to attend to the referee comments. I am satisfied that you have handled these well and improved the manuscript accordingly.

On re-reading, I have picked up some further minor comments. Mostly very minor typos that can be addressed in the file upload, but also a couple of further points I considered worth addressing.

Abstract: the numbers (1) and (2) are confusing for an abstract, are they necessary? If so perhaps make it clearer they do pertain to the two aims highlighted L18 and L20.

P2, L7: tricky wording. Would suggest “…appropriateness of drought index selection for specific applications” or similar.

P2, L17. Probably worth saying crop yields to avoid ambiguity.

P2, L25. Do these really need capitalising (Calamities Funds etc)?

P3, L6. You later go on to say what vulnerability factors are, but is it worth adding a few examples here (otherwise there is a lot of talk of vulnerability factors without so much qualification as to what you are really talking about)

P3, L13 and L27. Inconsistencies in use of single and double quotation marks, but I can’t particularly see why (also elsewhere in document). Check and standardize?

P6, L19. You mention the macro regions re: figure 2 but I don’t think you have yet introduced the macro regions, nor referred to Fig 1 (left)

P6, L25. This should be Figure 1, right.

P11, 5. There is a close brackets with no open

P11, 27-28. This sentence, adding following a referee comment, doesn’t quite make sense. Should this be something like “For vulnerability data which did not have multiple time steps available, the most…..”

P12, L10 onwards. This section is made very confusing by the reference to the ‘steps’ which don’t seem to be consistent through the section. Firstly the six steps are introduced at L8 –
L13. But then there are two long sections which just start with “first, …” and “second…” but which are not part of the steps per se. Then very confusingly, P13, L18 introduces step 1, then either self-refers, or refers to what seems to be a different step 1 (which seems to be the earlier paragraphs), two lines later!! Basically, the way this whole section skips about could be very confusing to the reader and could be made much clearer.

P14, L19 onwards. This sect 4.1 doesn’t contain a reference to Fig 2 which is surprising as it contains much of the info being discussed.

P17, L8-9, some formatting issues

Sect. 4.3 . One thing that has struck me on re-reading is that this section doesn’t contain any interpretation of the selections of vulnerability factors as predictors. Which in hindsight I find a bit surprising and something readers may naturally enquire about. While some are very logical, many are quite surprising and non-intuitive (e.g. water use for industry as predictor for ag and forestry in SEE; aquatic ecosystem status as predictor for wildfires in W.med; etc). I just wonder whether it would be worth adding a paragraph or two to acknowledge this. Clearly this is driven by the model fits, but do these patterns suggest some of the relationships are down to chance, given the nature of the underlying vulnerability datasets? It would be worth fleshing this out with some (brief) discussion.

P21, L1-2. This is an important addition following the referee comment. Wording is quite tricky though; would suggest “…this can be interpreted as meaning that prior standardization

P22, L19. New paragraph here?

P23, L5. Should be ‘as such’

P23, L20. “West to East and North” is confusing. Should this say “North to south” or something different?

Tables – check the numbering, they are now out of synch.

The sub-caption to Table 2 (what should be Table 3) has a quite important key of impact class labels which are also referred to in the next table. Is there a better places for this that can be referred to by both tables? Alternatively, need to explicitly add a reference to the following table back to this key? Also, there is no description for “AQ” in this key.