Both reviewers have recognized the significant potential of your work in advancing the theoretical understanding and practical implications of hydrological modeling. I fully concur with their positive assessments. While reading the manuscript, I have developed a few additional thoughts that may help you sharpen and contextualize your work in the new era of hydrology.

The role of vegetation and topography in your framework: Your current modeling framework centers on the spatial distribution of soil water storage, infiltration capacity and their dynamic link to infiltration and saturation excess runoff. I would encourage you to reflect more explicitly on the roles of vegetation and topography within this framework, as both exert strong controls on runoff generation processes. I trust you are already familiar with the relevant literatures.

In this context, I would like to draw your attention to an ongoing debate regarding the centrality of soil in hydrological modeling. Recent studies (e.g., Addor et al., 2018; Gao et al., 2023) have questioned the adequacy of soil-centric indicators for capturing hydrological behavior, with growing recognition that ecosystem functioning—including vegetation dynamics and land-atmosphere feedbacks—plays an essential role in shaping land surface hydrology.

I would suggest positioning your work more explicitly within an ecosystem-centered perspective (see Savenije, 2024; Gao et al., 2024). This does not require altering your model structure, but rather acknowledging how vegetation and topography may implicitly influence the parameters or distributions used in your framework (e.g., through the shape parameter *a*, the infiltration exponent η, or the spatial organization of storage capacity). A brief discussion of how your soil-based scheme could be extended or coupled with vegetation and topographic controls would greatly enhance the conceptual richness and relevance of your paper.

Detailed evaluation of model performance: While you have provided summary statistics (e.g., KGE > 0.5 for 90% of catchments), the manuscript would benefit from a more detailed and illustrative presentation of the model's performance. I recommend including additional figures that highlight in which basins and under which conditions the new model outperforms traditional approaches (e.g., saturation-excess-only or infiltration-excess-only models). This could be done through:

Side-by-side comparisons of hydrographs for selected catchments representing different climate regimes.
Maps or scatter plots showing performance gains (e.g., ΔKGE) relative to benchmarks.
Event-scale analyses demonstrating how the dynamic transition between runoff mechanisms is better captured by URSSIE.

I hope these points help you situate your work more clearly within contemporary hydrological discourse and further demonstrate its practical utility. I look forward to seeing your revised version.