Dear Mr Iwema,

Your manuscript “Reducing soil moisture measurement scale mismatch to improve surface energy flux estimation” has been subjected now to review by three reviewers. Two of them recommended major revision and one of them minor revisions. The reviewers and I think that the topic is of potential high interest to the hydrological community. Altogether, evaluating the different comments, I think major revision is needed.

The main points to be handled in the revision are:

1. Consider restructuring the manuscript and improving parts of the manuscript like the discussion of the literature (incomplete as detailed by reviewer #2).

2. The link between results and conclusions is questioned by the reviewers. In particular, the weak coupling between ET and soil moisture is not so obvious from the results.

3. Some topics require additional attention: the role of deeper soil moisture and the rooting depth, and also the quality of the different types of soil moisture measurements.

In your answer to the main points and detailed comments, please indicate how comments have been handled exactly, indicating also whether text has been deleted and what the position of newly included text blocks is. I am looking forward to the new version of the paper.

Best regards,

Harrie-Jan Hendricks Franssen – editor
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Dear Mr Iwema,

Your paper "Land surface model performance using cosmic-ray and point scale soil moisture measurements for calibration" has been re-reviewed by the original three reviewers. The authors agree that your paper improved strongly. Only minor revision is needed now, mainly to handle some remaining issues concerning formulations in the text.

I am looking forward to the final version.

Best regards,

Harrie-Jan Hendricks-Franssen (editor)

Dear Mr Iwema

Thanks for the revised version of "Land surface model performance using cosmic-ray and point scale soil moisture measurements for calibration". I reviewed your revised version and found that it is suitable for publication now after handling some technical corrections:

P1, L8: I think “very high resolution” instead of “hyperresolution” is better for this scale.

P5, L1: “California Climate Gradient Sites” instead of “California Climate Gradients Sites”? Here and elsewhere in the paper.

P5, L29: It would be good to indicate in the paper how frequent and large were the data gaps.

P7, L2: layer i; i should be italic.

P7, L20: comma missing.

P7, L29: closing bracket missing.

P13, L15-L17: reformulate sentence. Following sentence also unclear in relation to
sentence before.

P13, L25: “show” instead of “showed”.

P13, L26-L27: very unclear.

P14, L15: fewer than what? Specify.

P15, L11: you could add that these differences were however small.

Figure 1: Ticks on vertical axes.

Figure 7: Repetition in caption. Correct.

Figure 9: Include ticks on axes.

Additional thoughts:
- What is effective sampling depth of CRNS and how does it differ from PS at the different sites? What about difference in temporal resolution of observations? Could these differences play a role?
- How are you sure that for gaps in precipitation time series the precipitation was zero?
- I think that indeed the role of deeper roots can be important and including it in a future analysis would be important.
- What happens if you would use just one PS sensor? Then you have really a scale mismatch. A large number of PS sensors approaches the soil moisture content for the footprint.

Congratulations with your paper!

Best regards,

Harrie-Jan Hendricks Franssen - editor -