Dear Authors,

please revise the manuscript according to the comments and suggestions of the two thorough and well-thought-out reviews.

Best regards,
Theresa Blume

Dear authors,
both referees recommend publication and we will be able to proceed as soon as the minor revisions as suggested by the referees and myself have been implemented.
One of the referees suggests focusing on the introduction of the TA model at the Canadian site, including the comparison to the SA model and the discussion of correlations between site factors and TA model components and not including the comparison to the sites in China and Italy. I suggest to keep the inter-site comparison (and to keep it short), but I agree with the referee that these datasets need to be introduced (shortly) in the methods section. To avoid confusion it also needs to be made clear in methods, results and discussion what the purpose of this inter-site comparison is (by adding half a sentence with this information at the corresponding locations in the text).
Please also see some additional comments in the attached pdf document.
Best regards,
Theresa Blume

Dear authors,
a few minor points with respect to the edited sections and figures:

l.31 either “from a coarse-resolution remotely sensed SWC product” or “products”.
l.127: header and text need to be separated
l.163: please rephrase/correct this sentence (data sets are usually not applied). One possibility would be to state here what the purpose of bringing up these other data sets is. “To further test the applicability of the new method, we compared its performance at two other sites, covering both the hillslope and the large watershed scale.” Then continue with “Along a hillslope…”. And then at the end of the paragraph delete lines 172-176, which would repeat what he now have already mentioned in above.
l.612: “On the other hand” instead of “On the contrary”. Also “…spatial patterns do not…” instead of “does not”.
l.627: “patterns” or “the SWC pattern”
l.628: do you really mean the performance of the validation method was poor or do you mean that performance was poor? Please clarify.
Figure 8: the vertical green lines should extend all the way across the plot up to NSCE =1. Just extending them to the mean soil water content is confusing because these lines are not referring to these mean values but to the not shown negative values for the models.
Figure 10: the grey line surrounding the white triangles could be a slightly thicker – otherwise the triangles are hardly visible

Best regards,
Theresa Blume