This paper seeks to evaluate the consistency between independently obtained remotely sensed water cycle products and at a comparable spatio-temporal scale. However, the focus is on Evap as 3 Evap products are used and one GRACE and one Precip product. The novelty of this study is to look at consistency instead of uncertainty and/or water balance closure. This by itself is worthy for publication. However, there are a number of issues that need to be resolved as brought forward by the two reviewers. The most important issues are with the structure and readibility of the paper which could be much improved. Most significantly:

1) The term "hydrological consistency" should be better defined.

2) The authors should more clearly state the objective(s) of the paper, state it only in one paragraph and refer to that later in the discussion of the results.

In their rebuttal the authors already provide a much clearer description of their purpose:

"Ideally, these observations should be hydro- logically consistent: that is, an observed rainfall event should cause a corresponding change in soil moisture, for instance. Likewise, a reduction in soil moisture should be reflected by an increased flux of evaporation. Consistency is just another term that en- compasses the expectation of a water budget: changes in one term should be reflected in others. While this has been explored qualitatively in the past (McCabe et al. 2008), here we wanted to determine if the method (using spherical harmonics) could reveal some level of agreement between spatial (and temporal) patterns of these independent hydrological variables."

After that they could then state the objective as" So the objective is to check this hydrologic consistency for a number of basins where hydrological processes are relatively well defined."

3) State clearly in the introduction what the novel features are of this work (checking consistency instead of water balance closure and/or uncertainty and doing this at a comparable spatio-temporal scale).

4) More clearly define the what you mean by a "simple hydrological system" or "relatively well defined hydrological processes". What conditions have been used to select the basins.

5) Consider changing the title somewhat. As the focus is on Evap it could for instance be:
Evaluating the hydrological consistency among satellite based water cycle components with a focus on evaporation products

First off all, I want to apologize that it took some time to come to a conclusion. We wanted to find two reviewers (as in the first round), but finally decided to base our decision on one second review only.

The reviewer is generally happy with the way the manuscript has improved but calls for one more round of revision. Basically he asks if the inconsistencies that have been detected with the authors'method can be elaborated on a bit more and explanations be found for these. Also there are some remaining questions regarding the interpretation of GRACE data in relation to discharge. Depending on the way the authors are able to deal with the reviewers comments I will decide wether a final round of reviews is necessary or not.

The authors have gone to great lengths to seriously deal with the many comments of the reviewers through two rounds of reviews. The paper has improved significantly from this and is now ready for publication.