Dear Ms Bosmans,

Your manuscript "Hydrological impacts of global land cover change and human water use" has been subjected now to review by three reviewers. All of them recommend major revision.

I think that the revision should concentrate on the differences with other approaches, advantages and disadvantages of a global hydrological model compared to a land surface model, the impact of simplifications, an interpretation of the difference with other available estimates in the literature and an assessment of the uncertainty of the estimates. The modifications would especially impact the discussion part of the paper then.

More specifically:
1. What is the impact of assuming that precipitation is not affected by land use change?
2. Compare with land surface model based approaches which include an energy balance. What is the impact of not including the energy balance?
3. Compare your results with other studies and interpret the differences.
4. Try to address uncertainties of your estimates.
5. Try to include some verification component like comparison with remotely sensed patterns.

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 Ms Bosmans,

Your manuscript "Hydrological impacts of global land cover change and human water use" has been subjected now to re-review by two reviewers. They recommend publication. I also think that the reviewer comments have been handled well and only have some suggestions for technical corrections:

Caption Figure 1: “and” missing before “from the soil”.

Caption Figure 2: Brackets around Portmann et al. (2010) missing,

P6, L21: change to “roots mainly”.

P7, L19-L21: Rephrase sentence.

P8, L24: I do not understand this. In the sentence before you said that subcatchments smaller than 30,000 km2 would be grouped, but here catchments are as small as 19,4 km2.

P13, L18-L22: The same sentence is repeated twice.

P15, L8: skip “in”.

P15, L8: “does human water use (…)”. This seems to be a fragment to be reformulated.

Caption Figure 8: change to: “land cover change in m3/s”

P21, L11-L12: I am not sure whether this sentence is grammatically correct.

P21, L32: change to: “a global reduction of (…)”.

P22, L7: change to: “set-up of our experiments (…)”.

P23, L32: change to: “provided”.

Congratulations with your work and thanks for submitting your paper to HESS.

Best regards,

Harrie-Jan Hendricks Franssen – editor
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