This is not a technical review of your paper, but rather an assessment of whether the paper is suited for the journal and to check that it is not so hopelessly faulty that it would not stand any hope during review. It is also meant as a check to ensure that minimum requirements are met, so as to facilitate the work of “hard-to-get” reviewers.
Sensu stricto, the topic of the paper does not fall into the hydrology field, but into the oil field. Still, hydrologists may be interested in the topic because of environmental implications, because many hydrologists work on multi-phase problems (air-gas in the unsaturated zone and oil-water for pollution problems). So, it might be of interest to some.
One problem with the paper is its professional language. The paper is clearly written in “oil lingo”. Hydrologists would never speak of “breakthrough pressure” (I had to look into internet to find out that you mean what we call “entry pressure”). Hydrologists would never refer as Washburn equation to what we call the Young-Laplace Equation, which was written in slightly more general terms (two radii of curvature) than your Eqs. 1 and 2 (no need to repeat it) by Laplace himself in 1805. I must acknowledge that, while checking, I have found many authors attributing the equation to Washburn (mostly in the field of MIP, but not only).
I would also expect that most hydrologists would not know what “density functional theory (DFT)” and or the “BJH model to calculate pore size distributions” are. The term “pore volume per quality” is also unknown to me.
I must say that, despite of these “professional lingo” drawbacks, I was able to read the paper and found that parts of it were pedagogic, which I appreciate. But I also found it quite specialized, so that I, and I assume most HESS reviewers (the ones you are proposing are all Chinese, and come from mining and petroleum institutions, which hardly represent HESS scope and readership), would have a hard time assessing the novelty of the paper and reviewing it.
Therefore, I am rejecting the paper as outside the journal’s scope. I would be willing to revise this decision provided that (1) you argue the relevance to hydrology; (2) you argue the novelty of the paper; and (3) you provide a more balanced set of potential reviewers. Still, my recommendation would be to submit it to an oil journal. Another option would be “transport in porous media”, which is read by a broad range of scientists and which dwells on the kind of pore scale issues addressed in your paper.

The reviewers have made some significant comments that have received only a cursory response in your replies. Issues that deserve specific attention include:
1) Potential overlap with the paper by Chen and Goldscheider (JHyd, 2014). We are trying to discourage the practice of publishing similar material several times.
2) The huge fraction of rainfall that recharges has been politely pointed as unusual. I find it inappropriate to reply that “We will discuss the possible overestimation of recharge percentage of precipitation”. You must either argue why such percentage (95%) is right or why your model is wrong. Certainly, constraining the model with an overestimated recharge does not sound appropriate, because calibration will twist all model parameters to yield numerically consistent, but conceptually erroneous, results.
3) You have left unanswered the question by reviewer 2 about the scientific merit of this study.
4) In response to comments by reviewer 1 about the specifics of your model, you reply “We will add a brief discussion”
5) In response to the comment of also reviewer 1 about the unclear relevance of your findings for the general hydrogeological knowledge, you again reply “we will”.

In summary, you have not yet produced straight responses to the most critical issues raised by the reviewers. Therefore, I cannot accept the paper until I see those responses.

As you may see, I do not share your conclusions, but it would be unfair to try and impose my views, especially after the long time it has taken to finish this paper.

My view, which has never been accepted by HESS, is that snow sublimation is a very important process. I attribute your results to neglecting the rainfall lapse (increase of rainfall with elevation).


The paper is accepted for publication, but I send you attached a few additional comments you may wish to include (this is not compulsory, only up to you!).