As noted by both reviewers and in additional comments by Michael Stoelzle, this manuscript investigates an interesting topic but needs major revisions both conceptually and for readability. I urge you to execute the changes you propose in your reply to the reviewers, and especially to focus on increasing and highlighting the novelty of this work and supporting the statements in the conclusions and discussion with analysis results. I strongly encourage you to consider the suggestions done by Reviewer #2 about distinguishing the effects of SWE from winter precipitation and investigating the effect of summer precipitation. And you need to rewrite the abstract to comply with your aim of quantifying the role of snow. From your reply it currently is unclear HOW you are going to implement suggested changes. We need to review the revised manuscript before a decision can be made that the suggested changes are sufficient to allow publication in HESS. Please also work on the figures and tables as suggested.

Dear authors,

I have considered your responses to the reviewers comments, your revised manuscript and the additional comments of reviewer no.1. My evaluation is that some good changes have been made, but the manuscript is not ready for publication yet. Please find some points for major revision below:
- The comments and suggestions of reviewer no.2 have not been taken into account sufficiently. You have rewritten parts of the discussion, but mainly added speculation that is not grounded in the analysis of the study.
- The manuscript lacks process understanding to answer the research questions. For example, you make an implicit link between climate change, snow and low flows, but you do not investigate the separate effects of precipitation and temperature (SWE can increase with climate change if increasing P compensates for effects of increasing T) and do not convincingly answer the question of reviewer no.2 about the higher sensitivity of catchments with temperatures around 0 degrees.
- The effects of evapotranspiration and other water balance issues also need more consideration. Your assumption that actual ET is lower in wet years compared to dry years was contradicted in Teuling et al. (2013: Evapotranspiration amplifies European summer drought. Geophysical Research Letters, 40(10), pp.2071-2075.) for catchments including one in Switzerland. Your argument that you do not have ET data is not sufficient, because ET can be calculated from temperature or can be obtained from large-scale datasets.
- Similarly, your argument about the undercatch that is not taken into account is not convincing, because undercatch correction can be done, probably not with higher errors than caused by the methodology in the construction of the SWE dataset.
- It is unclear how more snow affects the timing of low flows (page 13). Is there more storage at higher elevations? The effect of a later melt-out (mentioned on page 14) is very important and the relation between maximum SWE and timing of min flows cannot be used predictively. Lower SWE max in the same catchment with the same temperature is not likely to result in earlier low flows. Also the correlations in Table 3 give no information about the driving factor since elevation, slope, drainage density, and maximum SWE are not independent.
- Furthermore, you refer often to groundwater recharge in the results and discussion (e.g. page 11, 13, 14, 19), but in your study you did not perform any groundwater analysis at all. These statements are too speculative.
- The introduction needs more comprehensive rewriting to increase readability and to decrease the enumeration of literature.
- You claim not to study the effects of climate change, but do speculate about these effects (e.g. on page 19). More analysis, for example on trends, might be needed to back up your claims.

I see the value of the new SWE dataset that is used in this study, but if that dataset is the novelty of the paper then you should change the aim of your paper and present a comparison with traditional methods to estimate SWE (e.g. by a degree-day approach).

These suggestions and those of the reviewers (new evaluation of reviewer no.1 and previous suggestions of reviewer no.2) need to be considered before this manuscript can be considered for publication.