Dear Libo Zhang et al.,
Thank you very much again for your submission "Identifying a Transition Climate Zone in an Arid River Basin using a Hydrological Drought Index" and your responses to the reviewers comments.

While one of the referees suggests two minor points to improve the manuscript, the second referee raises a couple of major concerns. From your responses I understand that some of these concerns emerge from misleading use of terminology and unclear definitions.
I do agree with the second reviewer that reading the manuscript leads to open questions. Therefore, your manuscript is not yet mature for publication in NHESS and I decided that major revision of the manuscript is necessary.
According to your response, I am positive about the new version of the manuscript and that you will take up the remarks of both reviewers.

Please follow the guidelines of NHESS to prepare and submit your revision (as .pdf) including (1) comments from referees/public, (2) author's response to each comment one by one, and (3) author's changes in manuscript. Regarding author's changes, a marked-up manuscript version (track changes in Word, latexdiff in LaTeX) converted into a *.pdf. Additionally, you have to upload the new version of the manuscript.

Please also note that this decision does not necessarily imply acceptance of the manuscript in the journal NHESS, and it still will depend on your reply (and subsequent edits to your manuscript) to referees comments, as well as on the reviewer comments of the revised version.

I look forward to receiving the revised version of your manuscript.

Best regards
Kai Schröter

Dear Libo Zhang et al.,
Thank you very much again for your submission "Identifying a Transition Climate Zone in an Arid River Basin using a Hydrological Drought Index" and your responses to the reviewer's comments.

One of the referees of your revised manuscript still raises major concerns regarding some key points in your manuscript. Apparently, the focus of your work is not yet fully clear: drought or aridity. Also ther are some remarks regarding background information and reasoning for selecting the particular indices you used in your study.

Therefore, your manuscript is not yet mature for publication in NHESS and I decided that major revision of the manuscript is necessary.

May I kindly ask you to provide a point by point response to the issues raised by the reviewer #2?

Please follow the guidelines of NHESS to prepare and submit your revision (as .pdf) including (1) comments from referees/public, (2) author's response to each comment one by one, and (3) author's changes in manuscript. Regarding author's changes, a marked-up manuscript version (track changes in Word, latexdiff in LaTeX) converted into a *.pdf. Additionally, you have to upload the new version of the manuscript.

Please also note that this decision does not necessarily imply acceptance of the manuscript in the journal NHESS, and it still will depend on your reply (and subsequent edits to your manuscript) to referees comments, as well as on the reviewer comments of the revised version.

I look forward to receiving the revised version of your manuscript.

Best regards
Kai Schröter

Dear Yongqiang Liu, Lu Hao, Decheng Zhou, Cen Pan, Peilong Liu, Zhe Xiong, and Ge Sun,
it has been a long process but now you seem to be there. The referees have agreed that your manuscript can be accepted for publication in NHESS. Congratulations.
As a last item I suggest the following technical corrections which I kindly ask you to check if you can improve them:
Figure 1: include a grid indicating the geographic projection

Best regards
Kai Schröter