Dear Mr Foolad.

Thank you for your submission to the Special Issue on “Observations and modeling of land surface water and energy exchanges across scales”. After reviewing the three referee reports and your responses to these, I am requesting that you provide some detailed revisions to the manuscript so that it can be further considered for publication.

I agree with the reviewers that your manuscript is both interesting and relevant to the HESS readership. Exploring the use of soil water content measurements as a means to independently retrieve or assess related hydrological processes is a valuable and potentially impactful area of research. However, I concur with many of the reviewer comments that there are a number of areas that require some additional detail and clarification. I list some of the key areas that require attention below, but request that you carefully consider all of the recommendations detailed in the referee reports.

1. All of the reviewers have requested some details on the type and manner of inverse modeling. Given the importance of this element to your work, it would be helpful to see some additional methodological paragraphs on this, rather than just referencing previous publications.

2. Some further comment and discussion on the quality of the reproduced evaporation is warranted. Accurately (inversely) modeling the ET is clearly non-trivial and there are a multitude of possible reasons that could affect its simulation beyond just issues to do with the eddy-covariance approach. Outlining these and providing some insights and guidance where possible (e.g. the assessment of parameter uncertainty and influence on ET response) would add considerable value to the manuscript.

3. Certainly there is no need to overstate whether the approaches accurately matches the eddy-covariance data: if the retrieval is judged to be relatively poor, the work still presents useful findings – especially if these can be related to either the interpretive model used or some other reason (parameter uncertainty, equifinality issues, measurement limitations).

4. Related to this, the paper would benefit by adding some detail of the evaporation sub-model, perhaps placing this in the context of other approaches that can be employed to estimate evaporation using the data that you have available (including the met data that would have been collected by the EC system). If it is a simplistic approach, perhaps it is unreasonable to expect an accurate reproduction?

5. Where possible, reduce and merge figures and tables, only maintaining those that are directly relevant to the material being presented.

I look forward to receiving a revised manuscript for further assessment once you have addressed these and the other referee comments.

Best wishes,
Matthew McCabe

Dear Prof Franz.

As you will see, I have received two referee report on your revised manuscript. Both appreciate the significant effort that has gone into improving this resubmitted version.

Referee #1 has reiterated a request for some further interpretation of results, ideally in a separate Discussion section. I tend to agree that providing some additional insight into the issues related to your approach, as well as any limitations or advantages, would be useful to the reader. Whether this should be done in a separate Discussion section I will leave to you, but it would be good to see some of your thoughts on the challenges (and opportunities) that may be presented by this approach, as well as addressing the issues raised by Ref #2.

Referee #2 is largely happy with the changes, but identifies a number of relatively minor corrections in their report. These should be fairly straightforward to address.

Overall, I believe the requested changes will not present any major challenges to implement and expect that I will be able to make a final Editorial decision upon receipt of an updated manuscript and a detailed response to the reviewers.

Best wishes,
Matt

Dear Trenton.

Thank you for your attention to the points raised by the referees, together with my own comments, in the previous review. After examining your response to these, I am satisfied that all concerns have now been adequately addressed. As such, I have recommended that the paper should now be accepted as part of the HESS Special Issue in Honor of Eric Wood. I congratulate you and your co-authors on developing this interesting piece of research and look forward to future submissions from you and your team.

Best wishes,
Matt