Based on my initial read of the manuscript and the reviewers' generally very positive reviews, I am pleased to recommend publication subject to minor revisions. I think your paper is a very important contribution that may finally put more 'nature' back into groundwater level mapping, following decades of decay in map quality due to over-reliance on the 'blunt instruments' of classical machine interpolation methods, including kriging. Thank you for your thorough and professional responses to the reviewers' substantive and thoughtful comments. Your responses demonstrate that you will be able to use the reviews to substantially improve the paper. In cases where you think the comments do not lead to fruitful modifications, you articulate your counter arguments well, and where necessary, perform the additional analysis to back up your position. Please follow through with your proposed manuscript revisions. Also, please be mindful that the methods used in your paper are still fairly unfamiliar to most in the hydrology community, and any clarification of those methods that you can convey will no doubt go a long way toward advancing future implementation across the community.

Thank you for following through on the changes warranted by the reviewers and your responses to them. I am approving the paper for publication. Congratulations!