Dear authors,

Referee 1 has raised a number of important issues of redundancy that, I would like to emphasize, need to be addressed. Referee 2 judged the results to be important and valuable new material to previous model applications. I therefore would like to invite you to submit a revised version.

Besides addressing the reviewers’ detailed comments in your revision, the main task will be to address the noted overlap to previously published material.

For the cited HESS-Companion paper and the Grouillet JoH paper, this should be straightforward. Please treat these in the same way as you would cite any other paper of which you are not an author or co-author. Hence, wherever necessary, please make reference to the papers rather than repeating the same information and make it very clear how this work builds on this previously published material. Besides condensing the text parts mentioned by Reviewer 1, a good example is Figure 1:
If it is really needed again because of the sub-basin delineation and the numbering of the reservoirs (as far as I can see these are the only differences to the original figure in the companion paper), the figure caption needs to make reference to the original figure, e.g. Fig. 1 …..caption…(modified from Fabre et al. 2015).

How to deal with the PIAHS paper that served as a basis for this paper is somewhat less clear and largely a question of editorial decision and ‘good scientific practice’ of the authors. Please note that in general, HESS is committed to publishing original material that has not been previously published (as peer-reviewed and indexed publications). While Copernicus journals allow republishing material from conference proceedings, the overall guideline is that it should not be identical, i.e. substantial changes or improvements should be present in the final paper. The PIAHS paper is a proceedings paper, but it is also properly published and indexed and thus a bit of an unclear case.
However, I think the HESS paper needs to make reference to the PIAHS paper and while some material can be reused from it, overall the paper should also clearly show substantial addition/change.

I am looking forward to reading a revised version of your paper edited in this spirit.

Best regards
Kerstin Stahl

Dear authors,

thanks for thoroughly replying to the reviewers suggestions.

Reviewer 1 re-reviewed the manuscript and found that the comments were addressed satisfactorily. I also conclude that with the citation of the PIAHS paper, the relation of the two papers is now much clearer.

Best wishes,
Kerstin Stahl