Reviewers have provided comments which if addressed adequately will improve the quality of the manuscript, and be acceptable for publication.

The authors should revise the paper in line with comments made by reviewers.

There are several suggested corrections shown in the uploaded paper.

The current title “Climate elasticity of evapotranspiration during multi-year droughts shifts the water balance of Mediterranean rain-snow climates” is very confusing.

Is the core-issue being investigated “climate elasticity of evapotranspiration” or the influence of the depletion of subsurface water on contributions of the various elements of the water balance”

One of the Reviewers highlighted the problem of the title.

I fail to understand what the authors mean by “multi-year droughts shifts”. I suspect the authors wanted to say how multi-year droughts affect the elements of the water balance. I am not sure whether this can be considered a shift, but just a response to reduced carryover storage.
The tem “Mediterranean rain-snow climates” will just confuse readers. Why not state simply “Mediterranean climate”.
Page 2, Line 16. The authors should avoid referring to transformation of rainfall into surface runoff or subsurface runoff as an allocation or “priority allocation”. The word allocation is generally understood in water resources management to refer to granting a user a portion of the water.
Another expression used is “full-natural flow”, what does this mean? Is there any half-full natural flow?
Page 4, Line 12-16. The authors should explicitly give the criteria used to define the droughts so that readers understand easily what was being investigated. The website, https://water.ca.gov/Water-
Basics/Drought, ,readers are referred to does not provide a scientific definition of the drought
Page 6, Line 16-17. Please describe the method used by Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) to naturalize daily flows. Readers have no idea how this was done, and the reliability of the method used.


Page 14, Line 14,the authors state “This storage is a critical drought-resilience source for asynchronous Mediterranean catchments buffering ET temporal patterns from the lack of precipitation through the accumulation of plant-accessible water during wet periods and drawdown
during dry periods”

Is the influence of carryover of soil water on Q and ET valid for all catchments? This statement suggests that this is unique to Mediterranean catchments. This behaviour has been observed even in grasslands, and wetlands

Page 15, Line 15, “These four phases associated with precipitation-runoff hysteresis have never been investigated in a systematic way”. My understanding is that the influence of the subsurface water on runoff generation before, during and after a drought is similar to any storage in a catchment. This could be in surface storage such as in wetlands.
One of the Reviewers highlighted that the lack of adequate representation of groundwater in PRMS contributes to poor representation of runoff generation during the post-drought period. The poor performance of conceptual models after droughts is a clear reflection that the models are not adequately representing the physical process.

There are several studies that have examined how droughts influence runoff generation and the relative importance of components of the water balance. See for example these refences

Lange, J. and Haensler, A., 2012. Runoff generation following a prolonged dry period. Journal of Hydrology, 464, pp.157-164.
Saft, M., Western, A.W., Zhang, L., Peel, M.C. and Potter, N.J., 2015. The influence of multiyear drought on the annual rainfall‐runoff relationship: An Australian perspective. Water Resources Research, 51(4), pp.2444-2463.

Please include the defination of "full natural flow". This is a term commonly used in California but not frequently used in other parts of the world. If you check in other paper in HESS this term is rarely used. Readers not used to this term will have difficulties to distinguish between "natural flow" and "full natural flow"