Dear Melody,

First, thanks for your submission to NHESS. According to your responses, I see that you will revise your manuscript to address the reviewers' comments. As a next step, please upload the revised marked-up (with track changes) manuscript version. Additionally, you have to upload a clean new version of the manuscript. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact me for clarification.

Please also note that this decision does not necessarily imply acceptance of your manuscript. The final decision will depend on your revisions to the manuscript, as well as the reviewer's comments on the revised manuscript.

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

Cheers,
Dan Li
Editor

Dear Melody,

Thanks for your revised submission to NHESS. I have received comments from both reviewers on your revised submission and both were reasonably happy with the revision. However, they also provided additional comments that I would like you to take into account.

Reviewer 1:

The writing should be further improved and the data should be double checked.

Reviewer 2:

I appreciate the efforts the authors have made to address all my concerns. The manuscript now seems clearer and more reasonable to me. After addressing a few minor issues as listed below, this paper can be accepted for publication.
(1) Since the spatial correlation issue has not been addressed in the SMW model, I suggest removing the term “watershed-scale weather model” from the Abstract and elsewhere in the paper.
(2) caption of Fig.1: Change “Read/Process ERA5 data” to “Read/Process ERA5-land data”.
(3) Please add at least one sentence to introduce the input ERA5-land data, including its spatial resolution (0.1°), time span, and the official download link.
(4) Lines 49-51 (in the changes-tracked version): Since the authors mentioned the example of “20 datasets for 10 years of data starting from April 30th,” should the following sentence be: “...the starting block of wet or dry is randomly selected (constrained by the starting date)” as April 30th, rather than “starting month”? Then, what is the “starting date” for your working example in Section 3? Please explain in Section 3 and add this detail.
(5) Given that the wet-dry threshold is nonzero (less than one mm of rainfall in 24 hours = 4.12 x 10^-5 m/hr; in Section 3), I think the wet threshold used for calculating the portion of wet periods should also not be 0 m? (the lower-right panel of Supplementary Figure 5).

As a next step, please upload the revised marked-up (with track changes) manuscript version. Additionally, please upload a clean new version of the manuscript. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact me for clarification.

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

Cheers,
Dan Li
Editor