Dear authors, thanks for your elaborate and comprehensive response to the reviews. You have identified a couple of interesting points to further improve the manuscript and addressed all comments satisfactorily.
Please go ahead and implement the proposed changes outlined in your replies to the two review reports in a revised version of your manuscript.
The revised manuscript will be subject to editor review only.

Thanks for making the improvements to the manuscript, the referee comments have been addressed adequately.
I have a few remaining minor remarks related to the present version:
1. Title: the current title gives the impression the paper is an evaluation study while in fact you provide a solution for selecting the appropriate distribution for SPI calculation. Consider revising to make this innovative aspect of the paper more apparent.
2. Abstract: the quality and content of the abstract no longer matches that of the paper, after the improvements that have been made. The phrasing in the main manuscript is much better than in the abstract. Please check and revise the abstract text.
Two specific points to consider for the revision of the abstract:
- addition of quantitative details on how much better the exp. Weibull distribution performs compared to others
- explicitly mention that distributions were tested for both observed and modelled precipitation.
3. It looks there is no discussion of the performance of distributions across SPI categories (presented in Figure 4). If i understand correctly, these reflect the center and tails of the distribution (not explained in the Figure caption, unfortunately)? This is an important aspect that merits separate evaluation (i.e; dedicate a paragraph to it in the manuscript).
4. the phrasing "bases on" is incorrect and should be replaced by "is based on", throughout the manuscript.
The new revised version of the manuscript will be subject to review only by the editor.

Thanks for addressing the last set of comments, the paper is ready to be published as is.