Dear Justin.

Thank you for your manuscript, submitted to HESS as part of the Special Issue on “Observations and modeling of land surface water and energy exchanges across scales”. After reviewing your contribution and the comments from the two referees, I am requesting that you provide some additional details and revisions so that I can further assess it for publication. I am optimistic that these revisions should be fairly straightforward to implement, as they are mostly structural or require additional paragraphs for analysis or interpretation. I have detailed some of the more critical suggestions below, but draw your attention to the detailed comments provided by each of the referees in their respective reports. I encourage you to carefully consider these in your revised version, providing details on where the manuscript has been updated in your response.

1. In line with RC1, I agree that a time series/sub-annual breakdowns would be very useful, but also appreciate the data limitations. Refined temporal analysis would be especially important for active management of irrigation systems, as well as for the LSM community in better representing such systems in modeling approaches. Where possible, try to expand upon the temporal aspect, either explicitly in the results or more generally in the discussion sections.
2. Both reviewers identify the need for some discussion on the broader application of these schemes, both in terms of their generality beyond this specific location, as well as their potential integration into “hyper-resolution” type schemes. Section 4.4 is an obvious area where these concepts could be expanded upon. I understand that an actual example may not be feasible, but you can certainly identify some of the challenges and opportunities that such a scheme may present.
3. An additional section (or combined within Section 4.4) focusing on possible implementation requirements or issues may also be useful: this may go some way to addressing both referee comments on the feasibility of the approach for broader scale application.
4. In addition to summarizing key results, the conclusions can synthesize some of these discussions to provide a broader scale context for the work.
5. Carefully review language and grammar: I’m not sure you mean “predications” on Line 449?

Overall, I believe that the manuscript will benefit from a focused revision, addressing these and the specific referee comments: I look forward to receiving an updated version.

Best wishes,
Matt

Dear Justin and coauthors. Thank you for your attention to both the reviewer and my own comments - the paper looks much improved as a result. I plan to send this to the same reviewers for their assessment on the revised manuscript. After receiving their comments, I will then be in a position to make a final decision on your paper - most likely early in the new year.

Best wishes,
Matt

Dear Justin.

I have reviewed the referee reports for your revised manuscript. After implementation of your extensive revisions, I believe that the manuscript provides a much clearer presentation of results and allows the reader to better interpret your findings. As such, I am very pleased to accept your interesting paper, subject to some minor technical corrections. These are largely grammatical in nature, and refer to some additional comments from Referee #2.

Our editorial office will no doubt be in touch with further instructions on how to proceed with publication.

Thank you for your time and effort in developing this thoughtful contribution.

Best wishes,
Matt