Dear Authors,

all three reviewers asked for major revisions and stressed the problem of selecting a lumped hydrologic model and not taking snow-pack and its melting into consideration. It would be normal procedure to reject such a paper and asked for a re-submission, but your detailed answers to the three reviewers give us an opportunity to proceed and ask you to submit a revised manuscript incorporating all your answers to the reviewers and announced changes to the original manuscript in your answers.

We will ask the former reviewers to check the revised manuscript again if their doubts are clarified and if their suggestions were taken into account.

The topic is of interest for the HESS readership, please, show clearly how your approach can be used instead of classical statistical FFA.

Kind regards,

Matjaž Mikoš
Handling Editor

Dear Authors,

we have received two reviews of the former reviewers that are in favor to publish the manuscript. There are only some minor technical issues to be solved beforehand:

- page 3, line 1 - it should read "validation is presented in Sect. 5.2"
- page 4, line 33 - it should read "Camici et al. (2011) and Li..."
- page 6, Figure 1 - please, check the ratio of the map, USA are somewhat elongated in Fig. 1a
- page 11, line 6 - it should read "Wright et al. (2017)"

I have checked the list of references and they are all used in the text.
There is though one non-technical issue. In your responses to the reviewers (major comment 5), you stated for Section 4.3:

Each event-based simulation is randomly paired with initial conditions drawn from a continuous simulation (15 years in the case of Stage IV, 69 years for CPC). Thus, we would argue that a large number of possible realizations of initial conditions are used.

Could you add such a text to a rather short Section 4.3, it is now only in your discussion with the reviewers, but it would be good to add this information for readers of the published paper as well, to better recognize the potential of your approach.

Thank you for preparing a very interesting paper on non-stationary flood seasonality and process-based FFA.

After the above mentioned technical issues are solved, the manuscript should be published.

Thank you for choosing HESS to publish your research results.

Kind regards,

Matjaž Mikoš
Handling Editor