Dear Authors,

This manuscript received four independent reviews, and all of them offered sensible and constructive suggestions. The reviews broadly concur that the manuscript is of interest to the research community, but that a number of methodological and scope issues need to be addressed. I am largely convinced that these points have been taken on board by your author team based on the response to the reviewers - thank you.

To summarize, I will be looking for the following changes in the revised manuscript:

(1) Clarify the scope of the paper and avoid making overly strong statements about what it achieves. The goals of model calibration and "identifiability" of parameters (it may be best to speak of identifiability rather than speaking of "avoiding equifinality" -- maybe see Wagener and Kollat 2007?) seem more appropriate than strong statements about correctness and accuracy.

(2) Clarify the assumptions in the modeling and how they are addressed. In particular assumptions about statistical stationarity versus parameter stationarity versus homogeneity should be considered.

(3) Improve the treatment of non-stationarity in the soil water timeseries. As several reviewers noted, the model was inappropriately inverted during a period of time where soil moisture is non-stationary - drawing conclusions about calibration performance in this situation is of highly questionable value. I reiterate the 3rd reviewers suggestion to consider adopting the frameworks of Dralle (which is simpler) or Viola (more complex) in order to address growing season conditions in Mediterranean sites.

(4) Improve and justify the goodness of fit metrics used

(5) Tread carefully around the treatment of soil depth versus Emax in the modeling.

I will likely ask 2 of 4 reviewers to consider the revised manuscript. Best wishes as you complete the revision.

Yours truly

Sally Thompson

Dear authors,

I must just ask that you take the time for a further set of edits to the manuscript. The present draft appears to have been a little hastily put together - there are spelling errors (e.g. imbedded instead of embedded), grammatical errors (throughout), and omissions (e.g. the full citation to Dralle and Thompson 2016 is missing in the bibliography). Rather than making life hard for the copy-editors, could you please take the time for a final, careful, detailed review of the manuscript (maybe passing it to your most pedantic friend with a red pen and an invitation to "go for it"?)?

The large scale changes appear to have addressed the reviewer comments well, so my concerns at this point are really these issues around polish and completeness. I have not completely surveyed the extent of such issues in the manuscript, but found enough concerns in a casual read that I must ask you to do this additional edit.

Thank you,

Sally