Dear authors,

As you have seen in the discussion, your manuscript has been evaluated by two reviewers, and I am happy to see that both reviewers agree in their assessment that your contribution is of high quality, that the findings are robust, and that is makes a useful contribution to a field which has seen a growing number of studies over the past years. Based on the reviews and your response, I believe that revisions are necessary to further improve the manuscript to a level at which it can be accepted for final publication. You can make the revisions along the lines suggested in the discussion, so I expect you have probably done most of the required work already. Because the discussion phase took a bit longer than "normal", I will try to deal with the revised version as soon as possible, and will push the reviewers to submit their evaluation as soon as possible. Looking forward to receiving your revised work.

Best regards

Ryan Teuling

Dear authors,

Referee #1 has looked at your revision, and he is satisfied with the latest version. However he pointed out two minor issues that you might want to look at:

Table 5: I suggest the authors compute the trends over the same periods across all parent data sets for a fairer comparison.

L98: "direst" --> "driest"

Under the condition that these remarks are considered, I am happy to accept your manuscript for final publication in HESS.

Best regards

Ryan Teuling