Dear authors,

Thank you for your submission to HESS and the inter-journal SI on The World Meteorological Organization Solid Precipitation InterComparison Experiment (WMO-SPICE) and its applications. Comparing the changes in the water-level records from a deep well geolysimeter to event based precipitation measurements of a co-located precipitation gauge connects two independent measurement methods from two closely related science branches: meteorology and hydrology.

To ease the understanding of the paper for both scientific communities, I suggest that you add some details about the principles of the different measurement methods. Especially the geolysimeter and its technical installation in general and more specific on your site would be helpful.

Please also describe the limitations of each measurement method, their differences and discuss how those differences were considered in your analysis. The two reviewers have pointed out some of these issues.

Please comment on how applicable the described method may be for other places? What conditions needs to be in place to “extend” a meteorological site with a geolysimeter? The main problem for precipitation gauges is the undercatch of solid precipitation due to high wind speeds, typically at exposed sites. From your paper, I understand that also the area of a geolysimeter should be chosen with care to minimize wind redistribution and sublimation. Wind exposed sites may therefore also be problematic for a geolysimeter?

You are now asked to submit a point-by-point reply addressing all the reviewers comments and suggestions, and prepare an upload of a revised manuscript accordingly.

In your revised version, please follow HESS’ English guidelines and house standards; e.g. replace “m/s” with “ms-1“ and mm/year” with “mm a-1“.

Yours sincerely,
Mareile Wolff
Special Issue Editor

Dear Craig, Garth, Lauren and Randy,

thank you for your respond to the reviewers comments and presenting the suggested changes in your manuscript. I think you have addressed the reviewers' concerns in an appropriate manner and the revised version of the manuscript has significantly improved.

In particular the additions to the discussion chapter resulted in a thorough review of the comparison results and the possibility to measure precipitation with a geolysimeter, also addressing possible limitations of the measurement and processing techniques. The named inaccuracies were corrected, thus improving the clarity of the content.

I'm glad to recommend acceptance of the revised manuscript (based on the version provided on the online discussion forum), only subject to a few technical corrections:

Page 2, line 20-24: Please rephrase the Yang(2014) citation a little as it may be confusing, presenting two very different deviations for windspeeds up to 7 m/s. I understand from Yang (2014), that deviation can be 20-50% percent between bush and DFIR in individual cases for the 6-7 m/s wind speed bin. Yang (2014) derives new adjustment functions based on the presented dataset. Those adjustment functions result in a (much lower) deviation between 4 and 10% for the entire wind speed range between 0 and 7 m/s.

Page 9, line 5-10: Please consider adding the relative humidity value for the period prior to the event to support the added statement that the decline is likely indicative of evapotranspiration.

Figure 1: Please add a) and b) to the figure as you are referring explicitely to figure 1b) and 1 a) in the text


Thank you for your choosing HESS for publishing this research.

Mareile Wolff
special issue editor