Thank you for your summaries of intended revisions to address the major/minor points made by the two referees. Both referees positively evaluated the manuscript, however both raised the need for structural improvements, aiming to better highlight the added scientific value of this investigation. In addition, apart from the various minor comments, the referees requested further information (e.g. addressed by an example) on where DA makes the simulated seasonal runoff worse. This would indeed be an interesting addition in the manuscript.

Overall, I am pleased to see that you agreed on the suggested modifications and I personally believe that your planned changes will address the referees' comments satisfactorily. I therefore invite you to submit a revised manuscript. I would encourage you to keep the Conclusion section short, presenting the key messages from this investigation and hence highlighting the new scientific knowledge.

The authors have satisfactorily addressed the comments of both reviewer #1 (K. Engeland) and #2 (anonymous). The manuscript is much better structured and key messages are clearly presented. It is apparent that detailed investigation would loose the focus on this article (note that this was also referee's suggestion for future investigation) and could potentially result in another manuscript. I therefore accept the authors’ arguments. Nevertheless, the additional information on the number of cases where DA improves the simulated seasonal runoff is adequate to support conclusions in this study.

In my judgement, this submission can be accepted for publication after some minor corrections (lines correspond in the revised version of the manuscript):

Section 1
Line 63: “… DA is performed through …”
Line 67: “… forecaster’s experience…”

Section 3
Line 223: “… are CDFs … Small CRPS values mean more accurate forecasts, with 0 value indicating a perfect forecast accuracy.”

Section 5
Line 356 – Please name the two approaches.
Line 370: “… Figs. 5-6…”

Table 1
State the units for all variables

I would like to thank the authors for polishing their manuscript. I accept the changes in the references, since they both seem very relevant.
A couple of further minor corrections given the changes done in the previous version of the manuscript.
1) In Fig. 5: Instead of re-explaining the metrics, I would suggest you to state "The verification metrics are the same as in Fig. 4."
2) In Figs. 8, 9, 10, and 14: "... plots for SWE and runoff ..."
3) In Fig. 13: "for Merced River same as Fig. 12"

Thank you once again for this very interesting investigation.

Best regards,
Ilias Pechlivanidis

Once again, I would like to thank the authors for conducting this very interesting investigation.
The manuscript can now be published in HESS.

Best regards,
Ilias Pechlivanidis