Dear Authors,
Thanks a lot for the valuable contribution. The study presented in the manuscript is really interesting and innovative, which is of great importance for hydrological process understanding and prediction.
As you can see from the referees' comments (which I fully agree), there are still a lot of aspects to be improved in terms of presentation and scientific contents. I hope you can fully address them in the revised version. In addition, I have several other comments for your references:
1) At the very first of introduction section, I suggest you can mention the importance of hydrological simulation in snow area, as it remains less understood, provides precious water resources, and may induce the flood, etc.
2) The iso-hydrological model can be helpful for stream water source appointment (similar to hydrograph partitioning, how much water comes from snow, rainfall, surface water path, groundwater path, etc.), which is important for streamflow prediction under changing climate. I would like to hear some discussions on that. Also, I hope the authors can briefly review both data driven apportionment method (e.g., He et al., 2015) and model based method (i.e., iso-hydro. model).
(He Z.H., Tian F. Q., Gupta H. V., Hu H. C., and Hu H. P.. Diagnostic calibration of a hydrological model in a mountain area by hydrograph partitioning. Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci., 19, 1807–1826, 2015.)


Best wishes,
Fuqiang

I can now confirm that your manuscript is accepted for publication in HESS pending a couple of minor technical corrections.