Dear Authors,
the two referees have expressed appreciation for your work, that is indeed extremely interesting
given the importance of better understanding the natural variability of droughts and megadroughts and the potential for the increase of their severity due to anthropogenic impacts (particularly significant for Australia, but applicable in other regions).

The referees, that I warmly thank, have timely contributed to the open discussion with very detailed and constructive comments on your work, and from your replies I am sure that following their suggestions, your analysis will further improve, clarifying the methodology (including more detail on the spatial correlation analysis) and providing further analyses and figures including the most recent droughts and additional interpretation of the results (see information on return periods and on relative severity).

I therefore invite you to proceed with the revision, following the useful advice provided by the Referees, hoping that they may find the time to give me their valuable opinions also on the new version of the manuscript.

Concerning the issue of averaging of the model outputs: even I fully agree with Ref2 that not all climatological models provide reliable estimates on the control period (the way forward would be to improve the models…), I concur with the Authors that in the climate modelling community there is more consensus on not weighting the outputs. I also agree that in this kind of analysis, where the series are not directly used in subsequent impact studies (such as use as input into hydrological models etc), bias-correction procedures are not strictly necessary, I believe that working on the “delta”, i.e. the differences between the control/observation and other periods, already allows a direct comparison across models.

Concerning the title: I agree with Ref#2 that the current title may be more effective for communicating the focus of your work, and I add another possible alternative to the Authors’ proposals for changing it: “Combination of natural variability and emerging anthropogenic influence shows potential for historically
unprecedented megadroughts in Australia”.

Best wishes,
Elena Toth
HESS Editor

Dear Authors,
I thank you for your revision and reply letter which, as expected given the replies you provided in the discussion, is detailed and comprehensive.
Ref#2 has read the revised version and is fully satisfied by it.
I believe that the points raised by Ref#1 (who could not revise it again due to personal engagements) have all been adequately addressed and followed by either modification in the paper and in particular through:
-providing more detail on the spatial correlation analysis;
-adding two new supporting figures showing the return periods of multi-years droughts and relative severity of the longest droughts, and improving the previous Supplement Figure 20;
-performing new analyses (the recalculation of the metrics over a period extending until 2021, thus including the recent extreme droughts, and analysing the maximum relative intensities of each drought) that are not shown in the paper, but whose results had been summarised/referred to in the new manuscript.
I think that based on the constructive comments of the two referees, your presentation has further improved: I am sure it will be greatly appreciated by the HESS readership and it will be a very valuable component of our “Drought, society, and ecosystems” inter-journal Special Issue.
Best wishes,
Elena Toth
HESS Topical and Special Issue Editor