The manuscript has received two reviews. Both reviewers had a positive reaction to the manuscript and felt that the manuscript was appropriate for publication in HESS, subject to what I would characterize as minor revision based on the excellent and constructive review comments.

The authors have responded to each of the comments and I would now instruct the authors to make their proposed changes to their manuscript. It was not clear from the author responses how Comments #3 and 4 by Reviewer 1 will be addressed in the manuscript so I ask that the authors indicate this in their final responses to the reviewer comments.

I look forward to final acceptance of this manuscript once the review comments have been addressed.

Thank you for considering HESS for your work,
Stacey

In reviewing the responses to the reviewers and the revisions in the manuscript, I still find a few areas that need to be addressed before the manuscript can be accepted for publication. I believe these changes are minor but important to ensure the review comments are fully addressed:

1) Both reviewers point out that the abstract is too long. The revisions made by the authors are not sufficient in reducing the length of the manuscript - it appears only a small number of revisions were made aside from making the abstract one paragraph instead of two. The abstract needs to be carefully evaluated so that it only contains the most important points. For example, there is too much detail on the approaches utilized. These sentences can be further shortened (or deleted) and summarized to express only the novel details of the approach.

2) Please spell out uses of "vs." and "e.g".

3) Please add to the new discussion about censored data the following statement (or something like it) in lines 996-997 of the revised manuscript so that the sentence reads: "Thus, overall, the substitution did not substantially affect the interpretation of the considered components; however, we acknowledge that the replacement of censored data with some fraction of the reporting limit is not generally appropriate for dealing with censored data [references provided my the reviewer]." The reviewer had very kindly provided a number of important references on this subject and I do not believe it is adequate to cite only Helsel 2012 and references therein. The authors have done a good amount of work to ensure the effect of the replacement of the censored data did not affect their results and interpretation but I do think the point of the reviewer is important enough to explicitly acknowledge in the text. Not every study does a diligent analysis as the authors did here and it is important that the authors convey to the readers that they are aware of the literature on this topic.

Thank for making the requested minor changes.