Dear Prof Mishra,

Your manuscript “Reconstruction of droughts in India using multiple land surface models (1951-2015)” has been subjected now to review by four reviewers. Although the reviewers consider the subject to be of general interest, three reviewers recommend major revision and one reviewer minor revision. Given the reviewer comments and their scoring of the scientific novelty and quality of the paper, I feel that this paper is borderline to rejection. It will be necessary to make a large revision of the paper including new calculations and presenting more details which should yield to more scientific understanding. Important points to be handled are:
- Model set-up. Important details are missing (spin-up, disaggregation of meteorological input data).
- What is the impact of different soil and vegetation parameters in different models? A sensitivity analysis needs to be performed in this context, to analyze the uncertainty in soil moisture content related to common parameters across the different models. This should provide more insight in the obtained results and their uncertainty.
- The model calibration also needs to be re-evaluated. A comparison with soil moisture data is needed. In addition, I think that it is cumbersome to use discharge data for model calibration as discharge in India is strongly affected by changing human impacts on discharge (pumping, irrigation) over the considered time period. Neglecting this might give wrong parameter estimates. Also further details about the model calibration should be provided with a sensitivity analysis.
- The uncertainty of the final result should be better assessed, as three models is typically too little for a sound uncertainty assessment. Follow here the suggestions by the reviewers.

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 your paper, after major revision.

Best regards,

Harrie-Jan Hendricks Franssen – editor

Dear Dr Mishra,

Your manuscript “Reconstruction of droughts in India using multiple land surface models (1951-2015)” has been subjected now to re-review by two of the original reviewers. One of reviewers suggests rejection of the manuscript and another reviewer minor revision. Unfortunately, two of the former reviewers declined to review the revised version. I checked the handling of the comments of reviewers #1 and #4 and my additional comments are:
- Comments (1e) and (1f) of reviewer #1 should be more reflected in the manuscript. I suggest to add some additional information, without entering into too many details.
- Comment (3b) of reviewer #1 should be answered, i.e. a comparison of the parameters for the different models, as indicated by the reviewer should be made.
- Comment 1 of reviewer #4 is only partly handled and the relation between parameter values and states should also be addressed.

I suggest to handle the remaining comments listed above as well as the comments of the two reviewers in a new, revised version. I believe that the remaining comments can be handled by a moderate revision. I am looking forward to the revised version of your paper.

Best regards,

Harrie-Jan Hendricks Franssen – editor

Dear Prof Mishra,

Thanks for the revised version of "Reconstruction of droughts in India using multiple land surface models (1951-2015) ". The re-revised version has been re-reviewed by two reviewers who recommend acceptance of the manuscript and rejection of the manuscript. However, the reviewer who recommends rejection of the manuscript does not provide specific recommendations and this review is therefore not constructive in my opinion. I reviewed your revised version and found that it is suitable for publication now after handling a series of technical corrections:

P1, L7: “the most severe droughts”. Of what? Please specify.

P2, L14: reformulate: “which point to uncertainty related to model structural error deficits”.

P3, L10: change to: gauge stations.

P3, L14: change to: using the method.

P3, L15: change to: which is based on a temperature lapse rate.

P3, L16: change to: we used a 0.25.

P3, L32: skip “that”, skip ”the”.

P4, L11: change to: “using the Noah model”.

P4, L21: change to: for each LSM.

P4, L23: change to: calibration parameter

P4, L27: skip: “derived”.

P5, L14: change to: “We used the one-dimensional Noah model (…) which solves the
water and energy balance in each grid cell.

P5, L16: change to: “(…) the atmospheric resistance coefficient.”

P5, L24; change to: “developed by the Food and Agriculture Organization (..)”

P5, L26: skip “surface downward” (2x).

P5, L27: change to: “was internally disaggregated”.

P5, L28: change to: “and the diurnal cycle (…)”

P5, L28-L30: something is wrong with this sentence.

P6, L2: change to: “CLM is the land surface component of the community-developed global climate system model version 3.0 (…)”

P6, L6-L7: Change to: “The basic difference in CLM from VIC and Noah is that CLM has a representation of groundwater table (…)”.

P6, L8: skip “the”.

P6, L9: Change to: “Land cover used in CLM (…)”

P6, L9: Include long wave radiation.

P7, L6: space missing.

P7, L20: Skip “the”.

P7, L23-L25: Rephrase sentence.

P10, L7: This sentence does not work.

P10, L8: skip “to”.

P10, L29: skip “the” before agricultural drought.

P11, L32: space missing.

P14, L11: change to: “does”.

P14, L13: Replace “about” with “in”.

P14, L14: write “different soil thicknesses in”

P14, L24: Change to: “the multimodal ensemble mean”.

P15, L11: Change to: “The three LSMs (…)”

P15, L13: Change “from” to “calculated by”.

P15, L16: Change to. “are more different between the three LSMs”

P15, L20: Change to: “simulated by the three models”.

P15, L22: Change to: “(…) soil moisture simulations from a larger number of LSMs and
consider other sources (…)”.

Caption Figure 4: Skip “the” before CLM.

Notice also:
- The ESA-CCI product is not reliable before the year 2001. I think that the comparison between 1979 and 2000 is therefore not meaningful.
- It would have been better if the authors would have explored more on the importance and use of this analysis, in addition to available satellite and in situ measurements.

Congratulations with your paper!

Best regards,

Harrie-Jan Hendricks Franssen - editor -