Dear authors,

Based on the referee comments and suggestions, the manuscript needs major revision to bring it up to the standards required for publication, but I do believe the paper has the potential to make a new and important contribution. Your responses indicate a willingness to accept most of their advice.

There were a few overarching concerns and issues that should be addressed. First is that the paper needs to clearly demonstrate what is novel and unique. There should be emphasis on how this relates to other regions, what insights are transferable, and how this advances our understanding and prediction of hydrological change in cold, mountainous regions under a warming climate. It should be made clear how this study differs and builds upon the earlier work here by the lead author (stated in the introduction), and also where this work is leading towards (i.e. the second paper to look at extremes).

A concern is the fact that land cover change is not explicitly dealt with or addressed, as noted by reviewer #1. Indeed, when applying models of today under future climates, “turning handles”, and getting results, it is questionable how meaningful or useful the results really are. It may be premature to say that land cover change and deglaciation constitute a second order forcing – these could potentially have a major influence and unanticipated consequences. In this region, under all plausible future climate scenarios, we expect rapid deglaciation in the headwaters and widespread forest impacts across the basin due to changing fire regime and other disturbances. How this will affect runoff responses and land–atmosphere interactions is not fully understood. Although it may be beyond the scope of this study to include scenarios of land cover change, this is a major limitation of the study and needs to be properly considered and addressed in the discussion.

I look forward to seeing your revision.

Regards

Thank you for addressing the reviewer comments and suggestions. The paper provides some interesting results and has been much improved. However, one of the reviewers still has major concerns about the significance and novel contribution of this paper (from an international perspective). There is still some room for improvement, as noted and explained by reviewer #1. That would help make this more than another mere case study, which had been a concern of the reviewers from the start. Please address this and engage more meaningfully with the international literature, especially in the introduction and the discussion.

Dear authors,
This paper has been improved and is nearly ready for final publication. However, I still have a couple of minor concerns.
1) With regard to how land cover was handled in the modelling, it is a limitation of the study that this was treated as static. The point is made that any choice of land cover scenario is arbitrary considering changes depend on a GHG scenario. The study uses the RCP8.5 emissions scenario, and under this is scenario it is understood (with much literature to support this) that there will be a dramatic increase in the occurrence and magnitude of wildfires. Not to mention other disturbances. The suggestion that this would not have a major impact on flow at the outlet of the basins is weakly supported and quite speculative.
2) With regard to the treatment of glaciers, the model handles these in a crude manner and these are again treated as static. The introduction section discusses how the loss of glaciers and other storage is expected to lead to increased inter-annual variability of flow in such basins, then the discussion dismisses this, notably without supporting evidence from this study. Perhaps the climatic forcing is a much more important driver of changes in flow regime than glacier loss, but this study did not examine this.
3) The modelling approach in this study did not allow for an in-depth consideration of the dynamic aspects of hydrological functioning and response to be represented (i.e. changing flow pathways, process interactions, feedbacks, etc.). These might have important implications across different scales.
I point these out as some limitations of the study. I would suggest that these be more clearly acknowledged in the discussion and conclusion, perhaps setting the context for further investigation.