Dear Mr. Jones,

In line with both reviewers I think that the work you presented in your manuscript is interesting and very valuable. Both reviewers are in general very positive about the significance of your work. I concur with Reviewer 1, that it is worth to discuss the fact that your approach does not provide depth-resolved information about soil water isotopes in the revised manuscript.
Reviewer 2 raised a series of major and technical points. For me the main point is the appropriateness of the statistical method you used to analyze your experiments, as he/she recommends linear mixed effect models. The others are mainly related to the logical structure of your manuscript, the information content of figure and table captions, a maybe little over-excessive use of acronyms and the necessity to add confidence limits to regression line.
Given the quality and the very constructive tenor of your response to both reviewers, I think that you should moderately revise this manuscript as outlined in your responses.

Best regards,

Erwin Zehe

Dear Mr. Jones,

both reviewers were very much pleased by the way how you addressed their comments. So I see no reasons to further hold this nice work back from publication.

Best regards,

Erwin Zehe