This paper investigates the impact of the intensive deforestation in favor of agricultural expansion on the hydro-climatic regime of the South America’s Dry Chaco region. The paper addresses some important questions about the feedback of LULCC on the vegetation growth (LAI, albedo, stomatal resistance) and the hydro-climatic response response (precipitation, soil moisture and runoff). This study uses WRF modelling to simulate hydro-climatic responses to deforestation scenarios. Analysing the impacts of deforestation in the Dry Chaco on local hydrology and climate, as well as in the neighbouring (which has been little affected by deforestation), is also interesting for understanding the effects at different spatial scales.

I however have a number of comments that need to be addressed – please see below.

Main comments:

1) The simulations are carried out over a 2-year period (2014-2016 for the reference simulation) which seems very short to analyze the effects of deforestation on the hydro-climatic response.

If possible, I would recommend to validate WRF on the 2014-2016 period (to validate over a period with few changes in land use), and then to simulate the control and scenario simulations over a longer period (30 years or at least >10 years) so that the results are not affected by the inter-annual climate variability.

The authors should at least specify whether the 2014-2016 simulation period corresponds to an El Nino or La Nina episode in order to know under which pattern of atmospheric circulation the simulations are being carried out.

2) This paper studies the effects of LULCC by analyzing the changes in various simulated variables (energy budget, precipitation, evapotranspiration, soil moisture, runoff, LAI, albedo, stomatal resistance) to different landuse conditions.

However, the model is only evaluated using observed temperature, precipitation and soil moisture datasets. It is therefore difficult to draw any conclusions about the effects of deforestation on the other unvalidated variables.

In my opinion the modelling experiment is not robust enough to draw general conclusions about the physical processes impacted by deforestation in the Dry Chaco. However, the modelling experiment remains interesting and the authors could instead present their results as a sensitivity analysis of WRF simulations to different initial landuse conditions.

3) The uncertainties related to the model and its internal variability should to be discussed. How can model parameterisation and initial conditions impact on the simulated results?

Regarding the uncertainty related to initial conditions, the authors mention in the presentation of the experimental design that each scenario was conducted with an ensemble of 4 members with identical parameterisations but different initial conditions that are 24-hr apart. But the simulations obtained with the 4 members do not appear in the results (only the average). It would be interesting to analyze and show some results about the sensitivity of the simulated variables (e.g. precipitation, soil moisture, runoff) to the different initial conditions.

Regarding the uncertainty related to the model parameterisation, it would be interesting to include simulations to test the sensitivity to few selected model options or parameter, or at least discuss the results referring to studies from the literature that conducted a full internal variability analysis of the WRF model.

4) The paper would benefit from a more detailed literature review and a proper discussion section to discuss the above points. The results of the first part concerning the observed changes in the Dry Chaco between 2001 and 2015 and future trends of deforestation should also be discussed and compared with other studies from the literature.

Detailed comments: Please see Supplement file.

This manuscript conducts a set of WRF-Noah simulations to examine the impacts of historical land use and land cover change (LULCC) and potential agriculture expansion in the future. By comparing historical, control, and future cases, this work illustrates the drying climatology and land conditions (e.g., warming surface temperature and decreased precipitation and soil moisture). However, several problems and limitations exist; thus, a major point-to-point revision is needed. For example, at least several months of spin-up are needed to initialize the soil moisture and allow the surface fluxes to respond to LULCCs; however, the manuscript doesn’t mention if the authors spin up the WRF-Noah before the formal runs. Also, the authors haven’t confirmed if WRF-Noah can simulate the specific mechanisms discussed. For example, the authors should confirm if WRF-Noah can resolve the remote effects of LULCC. Detailed comments can be found attached.