Dear authors,

as you can see from the enthusiastic reviews, the reviewers were quite pleased with your paper and think it should be published in HESS. However, they also raised many points that need to be considered in the revised version of the manuscript before I can consider publication in HESS. So, please make the changes you already agreed on in the discussion and provide me with a clear response letter what you did (or did not) and a clean and markup file showing all the changes in the revised version.
Thanks for your interest in publishing in HESS.

Best regards
Markus Weiler

Dear authors,
thanks a lot for the detailed repsonse to the reviewer comments and the revisions in the manuscript. I also had a detailed look at the manuscript as I had to evaluate how well the comments of the reviewers were included in the revised manuscript. Doing so, I realized 2-3 points, which should be considered before the manuscript can be considered for publication in HESS:
1) The definition of Sfrac (snowmled contributions) seem highly arbitrary to me (why 10 days for snowmelt and only 5 days for rainfall). How are the different phases (rain vs snow) of precipitation considered. Looking for example at the simulation and discussions done in https://doi.org/10.1002/hyp.11361, I think there should be either a clear demonstration that this ratio is a good representation of the snowmelt contribution or these results should better be removed from the paper, as otherwise these results are considered to be a correct representation of snowmelt contribution in the Rhine. At the moment, the simulations of Sfrac are not even compared to other approaches done for the Rhine valley.
2) I think that the model is currently limited in its results as glaciers are not considered at all. This is mentioned in the manuscript, but I think this should already be mentioned in the abstract, as this is a major limitation of the model in its current set-up.
3) The missing independent validation of the snow routine using satellite based snow cover maps is now mentioned, but only in the conclusion. The potential should also be discussed as well as already mentioned in the abstract.
I hope that the authors are able to consider my critical remarks.
Best regards
Markus Weiler

Thank you for refining the paper - it is ready for publication in my view.
Best regards
Markus Weiler