Dear Authors
Thank you for the submission of your manuscript and the answers to the anonymous reviewers. Based on this, I consider that the manuscript need minor revision before it can be considered for publication.

Please submit a manuscript that take into account the reviwer's sugestions. In addition, I have the following remarks and suggestions :
1) As far as I understand, A represent the soil water content from the surface reservoir (near the surface) and is compared to satellite products that observed few cm of soil near the surface. I wel understand the 8 mm value for the Rheraya basin, but the 30 mm appear to me quite important and cover more than the "few cm" observed. Could you comment on that ?

2) Parapgraph 4.3 (comparison by seasons).
Line 453 : the term "by moving from winter to autumn" is not precise. There is in both basin a minimum in summer and the autumn is not the maximum for the Reraya. Please change the wording here and also in the conclusion.

3) Table and figure legends
Please check all Table and Figure Legend. Some are very short (e.g Table 1) or wrong (Figure 2 does not show correlation, but evolution). The legends must be as far as possible comprehensive, so that the reader can understand it without refereing immediately to the text.

4) Tables : be careful with numbers : some correlation are writen with 2 digits, some others with one. Please replace 0.2 or 0.3 by 0.20 or 0.30.

5) Figure 1 : The grey color in the figure does not correspond to elevation only as stated in the legend. There is also an arientation component. Please check.

Sincerely
Eric Martin

Dear authors,
Thank you for the submission of your revised manuscript. The manuscript takes into account correctly the reviewer's comments and the paper is greatly improved.

However some minor revisions are needed. You will find my remarks below.

With my best Regards
Eric Martin

Line 495 : suppress a “,”

Lines 501- 508 : Please reword and simplify these sentences (it is quite wordy at this stage)

Lines 536-537 : I don’t understand the sentence beginning by “However…” . There are assimilation techniques (most of them) that can use data that are not continuous. On the other way, of course, if the series are too discontinuous, with too much missing data the assimilation won’t be efficient, but that is trivial. Please check this sentence.

Tables :

Line 868 : add the period considered in the legend

Line 871 : modify the legend : “Seasonal correlation between the different soil moisture data, in situ measurements and the SMA model (significant correlations are represented in bold)”

Legend of Fig. 4 and Fig. 5 : please homogenise the two legend (Add "A" in Fig 4 or delete in Fig 5.). Add into bracket “Sat” and “S/A” in the caption. E.g. Relationship between the different product of soil moisture (Sat) and SMA outputs (S/A)….

Figure 6 : Precise the caption : Validation results of flood events simulated for the Rheraya using different soil moisture products with a daily time step : the observed hydrographs (𝑸𝒐𝒃𝒔) are compared to the simulated 940 hydrographs using ASCAT (Qascat), SMOS-IC(QSMOS-IC) …. For the selected flood events described in Table 2

Figure 7 : see comment on Figure 6

Figure 8 : homogenise the caption with Fig. 5 and 6.