While all three reviewers appreciate the value of the study they also express important concerns regarding the manuscript:

1) The structure needs to be improved. As it is now the intro includes a lot of the methods and in the section results&discussion there is a mix of methods, results and discussion. Please clearly seperate these parts

2) Overall the manuscript would benefit from a language check. As partly noted by the reviewers there are quite same language issues. On point is the use of the tenses, which is rather inconsitent. Please use past tense for describing your study and present tense for established knowledge (previous studies) (note, this is opposite t the recommendation of one of the reviewers, but is the more common use of tenses in scientific papers)

3) Previous work needs to be better referred to.

4) Extreme events are challenging for the AM. This should be better discussed.

5) The importance for hydrological applications could be better clarified

Best regards,
Jan Seibert

The reviewers recommend major revisions respectively rejection of this revised manuscript raising important concerns. Usually such a severe critique at this stage (i.e., already after a round of revisions) should lead to direct rejection, but I think that the authors might be able to address these concerns, and would like to give them a chance to do so.

Best regards,
Jan Seibert

Thanks for your careful revisions. There are a few points, which need further attention as listed by the reviewer. These points should be rather straight-forward to be addressed and I look forward receiving your revised version.

Best regards,
Jan

Thanks for the revisions. I now find your manuscript acceptable for publication, but would like you to correct a few minor issues as described below.

Best regards,
Jan Seibert

P2L8, weather forecasting, flood forecasting, and hydropower production
Please split up the references so that it is clear which refers to what aspect

P4L11: S1, 1 should be subscript (also P7L31 and other places)

P4L15: The time of the day at which the predictors are selected
‘for’ instead of ‘at’

P7L14 and P14L4: delete ‘very’ (we non-native speakers often use too many ‘very’, these two are examples of this)

P8: When adding the second level of analogy on moisture variables of the 2Z-2MI method (Table 2), the number of candidate situations for this level did not increase when using the original parameters because they were conditioned by the N1 previously selected analogues; however, their dates changed.

I am not sure I understand how the dates could change if ‘they’ were conditioned by previously selected analogues. Please clarify this sentence. (what exactly is ‘they’ referring to? It reads like ‘parameters, but I think you mean ‘analogues …. Sorry, confused ….)