The manuscript “Variations of future precipitations in Poyang Lake Watershed under the global warming using a spatiotemporally distributed downscaling model” by Ling Zhang et al., was reviewed by 2 experts in the field of hydrometeorology. This study is within the score of the HESS, however as pointed out by the referees, some revisions would be needed for potential publication in HESS. I completely agree. Despite this decision, the referees and I see the scientific interest of this manuscript, particularly after addressing all the comments.

I am pleased to see that the authors manage to propose a number of changes that satisfactorily address the referees’ suggestions/concerns. I offer the authors re-submitting the revised version of the manuscript for additional review.


Best regards,
Alexander Gelfan (HESS Handling Editor)

I appreciate and thank the authors for their clear and concise response to feedback from the reviewers. The revised version of the manuscript satisfactory addresses the reviewers’ comments that resulted in significant improvement of the manuscript. I recommend the manuscript for publication, subject to a number of minor technical corrections.

1. There were published not a few downscaling algorithms keeping spatial correlation structure of meteorological fields (Charles et al., 1999; Mohamed Ali et al., 2017 among many others). The corresponding studies should be mentioned, and advantages of the algorithm developed in this study should be clearly denoted in Introduction.
Also, I recommend remove the first sentence (“Traditional statistical downscaling methods are performed on independent station measurements and ignore spatial correlations and spatiotemporal heterogeneity”) from the Abstract.

Ben Alaya, Mohamed Ali & Ouarda, Taha & Chebana, Fateh. (2017). Non-Gaussian spatiotemporal simulation of multisite daily precipitation: downscaling framework. Climate Dynamics. 10.1007/s00382-017-3578-0.
Charles, Stephen & Bates, Bryson & P. Hughes, James. (1999). A spatiotemporal model for downscaling precipitation occurrence and amounts. Journal of Geophysical Research. 104. 31657-31669. 10.1029/1999JD900119.

2. Page 3; line 52. Strictly saying, only MIKE SHE is a distributed model. Two others are semi-distributed ones. Please change

3. Eq. 4. It is not necessary to give this well-known formula. Also, replace VC with the “coefficient of variation” (CV) throughout the text