Dear Authors,
Your paper has been revised by two reviewers. They raised several critical issues that need to be fixed before the publication. You provided a detailed feedback during the NHESS open discussion. Also, the public discussion has been benefited from two short external comments. I think you should have a chance to propose a revised version of your work. My recommendation is to accept this paper after major changes.
In submitting your revised version, please provide a detailed list of the changes made to the text and a detailed list of your responses to the reviewers’ comments.
Please note that this editorial decision does not guarantee that your paper will be accepted for final publication in NHESS. Because of the critical issues found, a decision will be made when the revised version will be available and will be evaluated with the help of the same, or further reviewers.
Best regards
Paolo Tarolli

Dear authors,
your paper has been further revised by two reviewers. Moderate critical issues still persist in your work. Please check carefully the advice provided by the reviewers, then fix the highlighted problems accordingly. My recommendation is to accept this paper after moderate changes. In submitting your revised version, please provide a detailed list of the changes made to the text and a detailed list of your responses to the reviewers’ comments. Please note that this editorial decision does not guarantee that your paper will be accepted for final publication in NHESS. I will then provide a final editorial check.
Best regards
Paolo Tarolli

Dear authors,
your paper has been further revised by two reviewers. Again, moderate critical issues still persist in your work. Please check carefully the advice provided by the reviewers, then fix the highlighted problems accordingly. My recommendation is to accept this paper after moderate changes. In submitting your revised version, please provide a detailed list of the changes made to the text and a detailed list of your responses to the reviewers’ comments. I will provide a final editorial check then.
Best regards
Paolo Tarolli

Dear authors,
at this stage of the review process, only minor suggestions have been proposed. Please check carefully the feedback of the referee #2. In addition, there are also few comments from my side, mainly related to improvement of the figures:
- fig. 1 please avoid to write into the figure, simply add a yellow arrow, and then describe it in the caption;
- for the figures related to rainfall interpolation (fig. 4a, fig.12, fig. 13), please use a gradient of blue color, that is more logic when one is looking at water;
- fig. 7 is very difficult to read, since you overwrite some legend and word on the map, can you find a different solution? Maybe also a different range of colors?
- can you merge fig. 12 and 13 in one figure? In addition, what do you mean for "rainfall" and "rainfall intensity"? Please clarify. What do you mean for "20-year return"? Do you mean "return period"?
- fig. 14 and fig. 15: are necessary the maps of elevations? The investigated road sections are already showed in the figure 1. Maybe you can improve the figure 1, making the topographic map larger, and the symbol/number of the investigated sections bigger;
- a general comment for all the figures: can you select a different north arrow? Maybe one very simple? Delete the word "legend" in all the figures, since everyone knows what is the legend.
Best regards
Paolo Tarolli

Dear authors,

Thank you very much for your revised manuscript, this was appreciated.

After my check on the revised version of the manuscript and on your responses provided at the last review stage, I found a few further issues to be fixed before the final publication. Few of these seem typos, few are some necessary changes, and several are technical corrections on figures; please check carefully all these issues, since they can be critical; the paper cannot meet the high-scientific standards without clarification on these points.

Minor corrections/typos in the text:
- In the captions of figures 15 and 16 you corrected with “return period”, but in revised text (line 487, line 500, line 504, line 505, line 563, line 564) still you are repeating "20-year rainfall" and "1-year rainfall”; the question is: referring to the text (not to the captions) which kind of rainfall is this? Return period? Cumulated rainfalls? Others? Please correct;
- Equation (1): maybe there are few typos here, please also check in literature, but what is “t/hm2”? Is the "time" unit missed? Usually it is written as (t ha−1 yr−1); in general I recommend to check all the unit of measures written in this work, in order to be consistent with the RUSLE literature (and SI system) (“ha” is for hectare, “y” for years); see also fig. 12-13-14: what is “a” in the t km-2 a-1?
- in the equation (7) and (8) for the unit of the slope you wrote (°), however, in the literature, several scientists referred it as (%) or a-dimensional; which unit is this?
- Some small changes in the English and structure of the sentences need to be provided at the beginning of the chapter 3.2.3. Here my suggestions: line 356 (rephrase saying “slope length factor”), line 364-365 (rephrase with "flowacc is the total number of upstream/contributing pixels for each pixel”), line 365 (rephrase with “…and cell size refers to the DEM resolution (0.5 m). m is a variable length-slope exponent”)
- In the title and in the text: you can delete “water loss”, here you are discussing soil loss;
- I would finally suggest a further improvement of the conclusions: provide at the beginning a sentence that describes the purpose of the work and a sentence that describe the study area.

Technical corrections on the figures:
- in the maps, when you are showing colours of a gradient (not in the case of rainfall), better to use also a gradient of these (e.g. from blue to red, where red is the maximum or high risk);
- I would suggest avoiding to put the legend of colours (and also scale bars) into the figures when there is a background colour (it is very difficult to read it and to understand); this is the case of figure 6a and 6b, but also 15 and 16;
- figure 2-3-4 can be merged in one figure since now they cover too much space; if you provide this, then you need to change then also the figure citation in the text;
- I printed figure 4 to check quality; it seems that you used a very coarse DEM where one can note several strips; surely this is not the DEM you used in your analysis, please re-style it (here, only for the visualization and purpose of the figure, you can just use the new global 30m DEM);
- for figures 7,8,9,11, try to use a font size of the numbers and words smaller (maybe avoiding to use bold), to improve the visualization of the area (you did it well with 18 and 19);
- figure 17 and 18: delete in both the blue arrows, while adding (a) and (b), so they can be 17(a) and 17(b), 18(a) and 18(b), change the captions and in the text accordingly;


Thank you for submitting your work to NHESS.

Best regards
Paolo Tarolli
NHESS Executive Editor

Dear authors,
you provided a suitable reply to most of the minor/technical comments I raised. However, I would recommend fixing a few technical points i highlighted at the last time since you missed it:
(1) I suggest changing the title as "Dangerous degree forecast of soil loss on highway slopes in mountainous areas of Yunnan–Guizhou Plateau (China) using the Revised Universal Soil Loss Equation", therefore delete "water loss";
(2) In the several sections of text when reporting t·km−2·a−1 (also in fig. 10-11-12) please clarify the letter "a", is this year? If so, it should be "yr-1" or "y-1" (it depends on which letter you use for "year" eg. at line 258-259); in any case, for "year" i recommend the acronym "yr" since it is the most commonly used;
(3) I would suggest a gradient of colour in figure 5, 6, and figure 7 (also, in figure 6 you missed the units);
The paper after such changes will be ready for publication.
Thank you for submitting your work to our journal.
Best regards
Paolo Tarolli