Reviewer 1:

The manuscript addresses a very significant issue of regional multisectoral drought impact assessment. However, the manuscript is overly descriptive, resembling a dissertation thesis. Each section should be concise and engaging.

We thank Reviewer 1 for reviewing our manuscript and providing constructive feedback.

The feedback from yourself and Reviewer 2 that the organization and length of the paper hamper reader engagement prompted us to step back and assess how the paper can be re-organized to communicate our findings more effectively. We have identified three changes that we believe will significantly improve the manuscript and address the concerns from both reviewers:

1. Expand the Data section (Section 2.3) to include a formal description of Methods by moving methods descriptions from Sections 3.0 and 4.0 to Section 2.
2. Move the detailed influence diagram (Figure 2) to the end of the Results section. During our review of the paper in response to reviewer comments, we realized that introducing the full influence diagram at the beginning of the Results was likely overwhelming to the reader. The revised paper will instead introduce a highly simplified diagram that summarizes the content of each of the Results sections and the detailed influence diagram will be presented in a new section following Section 4.3 before the Discussion.
3. A complete overhaul of the Discussion. The reviewer feedback helped us realize that the Discussion was too focused on introducing new information rather than highlighting and discussing key findings. We propose replacing the existing Discussion sections with two new sections that focus on 1) Insights from the detailed influence diagram and 2) Discussing limitations and future work. The detailed influence diagram will be used to guide the first Discussion section about key findings on how drought propagates different multisectoral impacts and their interactions. The multisectoral impacts discussion will be presented in both generic terms of the types of impacts and interactions one could expect in any study region and also specific impacts in the study basin.

Before providing point-by-point responses, we want to address the general comment that the manuscript is overly descriptive with a comparison made to it seeming like a dissertation thesis. We acknowledge in our responses below that some areas of the manuscript can certainly be made more focused and succinct, and tightening the text will be a key focus of our revisions. Trying to address the why of our findings led to the lengthy and descriptive style of writing that you point out. During revisions we will make a concerted effort to shorten areas of the Results as long as doing so does not remove context necessary to understand why the impacts or responses manifested the way that they did.

Some specific comments are as follows:

Figure 1: The legend needs correction, and the figure title is too long. Consider moving the region description to a separate paragraph.

Thank you for identifying the typo in the legend. We will fix the legend in Figure 1 and shorten the figure caption, moving some of the caption content to the main text.

The Methodology and Results sections should be distinct for clarity. Currently, Section 3 combines both, making it challenging to discern the study's process and findings.

This is a fair critique of our decision to integrate background on the data analysis approach within the Results section. Our revisions will expand the Data section (Section 2.3) to also include a formal description of Methods by moving methods descriptions from Sections 3.0 and 4.0 to Section 2.

In Section 3, there is an excessive explanation of what a DAG is and its benefits. However, it's unclear how you constructed the influence diagram, including the choice of nodes and links. Explain whether the influence diagram was adapted from previous literature or a survey. Elaborate on the process of selecting nodes and their relevance to the region.

In the interest of shortening the paper as much as possible, we will shorten the DAG explanation during revision, without compromising its clarity. Regarding how the influence diagram was constructed, the revisions will make it clear that the influence diagram is a novel product of this study. We created the influence diagram by synthesizing findings of drought impacts in the Colorado Basin, TX from reviewing thousands of pages of regional water planning documents, reading over a hundred academic papers and reports, and by analyzing the 15 datasets presented in this study.  

In Figure 3, clarify the Y-axis for "g-i." Also, explain why there is a declining trend in agricultural water use for the upper region, if applicable.

We will rename the Y-axis label for subplots g-i in Figure 3 as “Total sectoral use” instead of “Sectoral” which was vague. The declining trend that started during the drought does not have an obvious explanation because it does not reflect comparatively large reduction in irrigated acres for major crops. One plausible explanation would be adoption of more efficient irrigation technology, but we don’t have data to support that hypothesis. We can make this clear in the paper that this trend is present but a reason for the trend is not supported by the crop data nor is explained in any of the sources we reviewed.

Elaborate on what you mean by "reflecting a transition to a more drought-tolerant supply" in line 185. Provide specific details or context to make this statement clearer.

We can briefly expand on this statement, which is in reference to thermoelectric plants increasing their supply from GW.

The Results section is excessively lengthy, which results in poor readership engagement. Some of the figures may be moved as intermediary figures in the supplementary material, and essential findings should be emphasized in figures/tables in the manuscript.

Reducing the length of the Results section was something that we grappled with throughout multiple internal revisions before submitting to review. As mentioned in a previous response, the broad overview covering multisectoral drought impacts and adaptive responses covers vastly more topics than a typical research article. However, we don’t want the length of the Results section to be off-putting to readers. Part of the revisions process will be to shorten the Results section as much as possible without jeopardizing the nuances of the findings.

As part of the revision process, we will evaluate the need to retain all 11 figures in the main text. Depending on how much content is cut out and modified, some of the figures may no longer be essential to the main text and can be relocated to the Supplement.

The Discussion section reads more like a literature review than a discussion of the study's major findings.

Based on the feedback from yourself and Reviewer 2, the Discussion section is clearly a weakness of the manuscript. A main focus for our revisions will be a complete overhaul of the Discussion. We propose removing the existing Discussion sections and replacing them with two new sections that focus on 1) insights from the detailed influence diagram and 2) discuss limitations and future work. to guide the Discussion about how drought propagates different multisectoral impacts and their interactions.

The limitations and future scope of the study are not well depicted.

A discussion of limitations and future work will be added as a new section to the Discussion.

The reference format should be consistent.

Reviewer 2 also identified at least one instance where there were extra brackets around an in-text citation. We will closely review all of the citations to make sure they are correctly and consistently formatted.

Reviewer 2:

The paper “Multisectoral analysis of drought impacts and management responses to the 2008-2015 record drought in the Colorado Basin, Texas: A blueprint for regional multisectoral drought impact assessment” by Ferencz et al. present drought impacts in the Colorado Basin, Texas.

This topic is of great interest to the journal's audience and the research community. The authors assessed a wide variety of impacts that are detailed in the text. Despite the interesting topic, the paper presents some issues that need to be addressed before publication. The primary issue concerns the manuscript's style, which is very long and it is subdivided into paragraphs that tend to jeopardize the information provided.

The feedback from yourself and Reviewer 1 that the organization and length of the paper hamper reader engagement prompted us to step back and assess how the paper can be re-organized to communicate our findings more effectively. We have identified three changes that we believe will significantly improve the manuscript and address the concerns from both reviewers:

1. Expand the Data section (Section 2.3) to include a formal description of Methods by moving methods descriptions from Sections 3.0 and 4.0 to Section 2.
2. Move the detailed influence diagram (Figure 2) to the end of the Results section. During our review of the paper in response to reviewer comments, we realized that introducing the full influence diagram at the beginning of the Results was likely overwhelming to the reader. The revised paper will instead introduce a highly simplified diagram that summarizes the content of each of the Results sections and the detailed influence diagram will be presented in a new section following Section 4.3 before the Discussion.
3. A complete overhaul of the Discussion. The reviewer feedback helped us realize that the Discussion was too focused on introducing new information rather than highlighting and discussing key findings. We propose replacing the existing Discussion sections with two new sections that focus on 1) Insights from the detailed influence diagram and 2) Discussing limitations and future work. The detailed influence diagram will be used to guide the first Discussion section about key findings on how drought propagates different multisectoral impacts and their interactions. The multisectoral impacts discussion will be presented in both generic terms of the types of impacts and interactions one could expect in any study region and also specific impacts in the study basin.

The paper's division into paragraphs makes it fragmented and challenging to follow. While the information regarding drought impacts is highly relevant, its presentation is in the form of a list, which might make it difficult for readers to comprehend all the information. The paper would greatly benefit from consistent reorganization and synthesis of the text. Please consider using figures to visually synthesize the numerical data and trends, etc. For example, consider using figures to illustrate changes over time, as demonstrated in [1], which also published the dataset used for analysis.

We are confused by the comment that the “paper’s division into paragraphs makes it fragmented and challenging to follow.” It is not clear what alternative writing style there is to organizing groups of ideas into paragraphs and this comment does not provide a specific suggestion about how our writing could be presented differently. We welcome elaboration on this comment to understand how the text can be improved. Our interpretation of this comment is that it is referring to wanting a more condensed synthesis of findings. Our revisions will aim to synthesize the text in the Results sections, where possible. However, explaining impacts and responses across three different management regions inherently requires listing impacts/responses and explaining how they were similar or different between the three regions. As described in our response to Reviewer 1, over-synthesizing could remove the important context for the multisectoral impacts and responses.

Regarding alternative data visualizations, part of the revision processes will be to evaluate whether some of the current figures can be modified.  

Lastly, the published paper will provide a link to a repository that contains the datasets and data analysis scripts used to produce the figures in the paper.

There is missing information concerning the case study areas, particularly regarding the climate and the primary characteristics of the three areas. For instance, the Upper Region is characterized by a low population, yet it utilizes significantly more water than the other regions. Notably, there is no storage associated with the Upper Region, and it primarily relies on groundwater. Could you please expand on these concepts?

The aim of Section 1.3 and Table 1 was to highlight regional differences in climate, water use, and storage infrastructure. We can expand this section, keeping length issues in mind, to make sure that differences in regional characteristics are clear to the reader as they are key to understanding many of the drought impacts.

The Discussion section reports some data; please focus on the discussion alone, while the data should be presented in the main text.

As described above, we propose a complete overhaul of the Discussion. We propose removing the existing Discussion sections and replacing them with two new sections that focus on 1) Insights of multisectoral impacts using the detailed influence diagram to guide the topics discussed and 2) A discussion of limitations and future work. The new Discussion sections will not introduce new data.

Please expand the conclusions and demonstrate the relevance of this work, not only specifically to the case study area but also more broadly in terms of lessons learned and potential future improvements for effective drought mitigation.

Reviewer 1 had a similar comment. Our revisions will make sure to discuss key lessons learned from this regional study than can more broadly apply to improving drought mitigation in other regions.

Additionally, please provide figures in high-quality formats.

The figure quality from the word to PDF conversion is very poor. We can contact the editorial office to see if we can provide a separate PDF that contains high quality versions of the figures for reviews of the revised manuscript. We provided high resolution SVGs versions of each figure during submission and those high-quality versions will be used if this paper is accepted for publication.

Fig. 1: The figure reports the drought index, but this index hasn't been introduced in the text. Please include details about it.

We will add a brief description of the drought index in the Background section where Figure 1, which shows the time series of basin-wide drought index, is introduced.

Table 1: I kindly suggest presenting values in percentage points, such as SW and GW, for ease of reading.

Reporting sectoral use and SW vs GW use in Table 1 as percentages is a great suggestion. We will add percentages in parentheses next to the reported volume so the reader can easily see the relative amount/importance of water use. We would like to keep the volumetric data as well because we think they are important for understanding regional differences in sectoral water use and surface water vs groundwater use.

Line 100: The Palmer Drought Severity Index is mentioned without an introduction. Can you please provide more details about this index, such as how it is computed, the threshold values associated with different drought conditions, and references?

We will provide a brief description and reference to the Palmer Drought Severity Index methodology.

Point n.5, line 107: Perhaps this was also linked with a low population value, hence the area's vulnerability was much smaller than in recent years. In this context, past drought events may have had a smaller impact. Please expand on this concept by connecting point 5 with n.4 with a couple more lines.

As suggested, we will elaborate on how point n4 is related to point n5. We will explain that the much larger population, particularly in the lower region, has increased the population potentially impacted by drought impacts and has also led to increased sectoral competition for surface water. However, it is difficult to quantify whether past droughts had smaller impacts because there is scant data for the previous drought of record to make such comparisons so we are hesitant to make the statement that past droughts may have been less impactful.

Figure 4: Please place the legend outside the figure.

We can move the legend to the right of the two figure .

Please specify which reservoirs you are referring to. Line 260 and following: The topic of reservoir management, particularly in dry conditions, is complex. Therefore, it would be interesting to delve deeper into it. Note that many authors have investigated the issue of reservoir management and its impacts on water availability. For example, see [2,3], which have also been cited later in the Discussion section.

We should have been clearer about which reservoirs were affected by 1) record low inflows and 2) large releases for agriculture. We will clarify that both upper and lower management regions were affected by record low inflows, but that only the lower region was affected by the large agricultural releases.

It's interesting to explore the management strategies for mitigation. For instance, quantifying how the supply strategy mitigated the drought effects would be interesting

We agree that reservoir management is a critical part of drought mitigation. The key role reservoirs played in the study basin is cited numerous times throughout the text (provide examples). Additionally, Section 3.2 on Reservoir Drought is one of the longest subsections in the Results because of how important reservoirs are to the water supply of the basin. However, it would be very difficult, and a separate study, to quantify differences in drought impacts under a counterfactual scenario where reservoir management was removed, which is the approach that would be necessary to quantify the degree to which reservoirs mitigated impacts. We will make sure to emphasize the critical role surface supply from reservoirs was to sectors in the middle and lower basins during the drought. For example, we will mention that the City of Austin had to rely heavily on reservoir releases rather than its run of the river rights during the severe drought year in 2011. Similarly, reservoirs were critical for providing a reliable source of cooling water to power plants and surface water to agriculture. However, a more detailed analysis to quantify the effect of reservoir releases on mitigating drought impacts would require an assessment of shortages under natural flow conditions which is beyond the scope of this high-level review study.

Line 393: There are two consecutive brackets in this line. I suggest checking the reference style.

Reviewer 1 also noted some reference style inconsistencies. We will thoroughly check every in-text reference for accuracy and consistency.

Line 440: Can you please expand a bit more on this concept, maybe by providing a percentage? For example, "However, agricultural impacts would have been far more severe if losses weren’t partially offset by federal assistance and crop insurance (TWDB, 2022b)."

Unfortunately, insurance payments are not available at the county level or water management region. At a state level, the worst drought year in 2011 had over $13 billion in estimated crop losses. If available, we will try to obtain the state level data of insurance payments in 2011 to illustrate the magnitude of insurance payments but clarify that such data was not available for the scale of our analysis.

Line 651: " Notable changes to water management and planning include updating policies to conserve water more aggressively during future droughts, new laws to improve regional water planning, and modelling advancements to improve water management and planning." Please consider revising this sentence for better connection to the content.

This sentence didn’t add any insight to the content of this Section. We will remove this sentence and instead start Section 4.3 with the first full paragraph.

Paragraph “4.3 Water Management Responses and Planning Innovations” is an interesting topic, but the content should be presented more coherently to avoid a mere "list of information" format.

This comment is similar to the general comment that a weakness of the paper is that information is presented “in the form of a list, which might make it difficult for readers to comprehend." ”As we stated above, our interpretation of this comment is that it is referring to wanting a more condensed synthesis of findings. However, for the amount of information that is presented in Section 4.3, the text in each of the three main paragraphs is already quite succinct in describing how 1) reservoir management changed (paragraph 1), 2) what modeling improvements were made (paragraph 2), and 3) how new laws were passed to improve drought preparedness (paragraph 3). We will work on condensing the content of 4.3 as much as possible.

References:

[1]        Kreibich, H., et al., "The challenge of unprecedented floods and droughts in risk management", Nature. 608, 80–86 (2022).

[2]        Di Baldassarre, G., Wanders, N., AghaKouchak, A., Kuil, L., Rangecroft, S., Veldkamp, T.I.E., Garcia, M., van Oel, P.R., Breinl, K., Van Loon, A.F., "Water shortages worsened by reservoir effects", Nat. Sustain. 1, 617–622 (2018).

[3]        Van Loon, A.F., Gleeson, T., Clark, J., Van Dijk, A.I.J.M., Stahl, K., Hannaford, J., Di Baldassarre, G., Teuling, A.J., Tallaksen, L.M., Uijlenhoet, R., Hannah, D.M., Sheffield, J., Svoboda, M., Verbeiren, B., Wagener, T., Rangecroft, S., Wanders, N., Van Lanen, H.A.J., "Drought in the Anthropocene", Nat. Geosci. 9, 89–91 (2016).