Dear Authors,
Thank you for your willingness to revise the paper. I do not agree to your suggestion of minor revisions as I see similar shortcomings like the two reviewers. The decisions of the reviewers are plausible which finally lead to my decision that major revisions of the manuscript are required to be accepted for publication. In your response to reviewers you sufficiently addressed most of the comments. The most critical issue is to carry-out additional model runs to further analyze the sensitivity of your changes made.

In your response letter you argue that EWT method has already been explained in great detail in other publications, nevertheless, the NWT model differs from the EWT model and several improvements were made. But which improvement led to the better model performance, i.e. model results compared to EWT?

To increase the credibility of your recommendations made in the discussion and conclusions sections, I suggest investigating the influence of individual model input parameters on the model output as recommended by the reviewers. Therefore a sensitivity analysis should be performed (as recommended by reviewer #2) or the analysis of further model experiments as suggested by reviewer #1. Both ways of extended analysis will also provide evidence of the research quality of your manuscript, increase the model’s reliability and build a robust scientific basis for further model developments.

I would like to encourage you to again reflect the reviewers’ comments with regard better understanding of changes made in the models and contributions to model improvement, and not having the main focus on changing the method to increase speed.

Dear Authors,
I appreciate your decision to change and resubmit the manuscript. Overall, the manuscript has very much improved, in particular in clarity and further insights due to the sensitivity analysis and comparison of scales.

There are some minor corrections that need to done before publication:

1) Section 3.3.3 and response to A3: "These values were also used by a 200m resolution EWT model in the Amazon basin (Fan and Miguez-Macho, 2010a)." In the revised version you removed the values of the calibration factors a, b, fmin from the text and refer to the Appendix. But in the Appendix you give numbers for a, b and fmin based on experience of model calibration in North America. Please clarify!

2) A reference to Fig. 10 is not set in the text.

3) Section 6, page 16, line 32: I recommend to rephrase the sentence "Also, this study..."