Dear Monica and co-authors,

thanks for the detailed online replies. I would like to invite you to submit a revised manuscript, which will be re-reviewed by one of the reviewers and by myself.

In your revisions, please take the comments by the reviewers seriously that I would summarise by "clarifying the science contribution of this case study". I agree with the reviewers that the role of the case study for the advance (or detecting limits) of causal understanding and the putting in the long-term context needs clarification - or in short, needs to go beyond a report-type description. Please note that this contribution also needs to be stand-alone for this paper and cannot rely on the hydrological analysis presented in another paper under review.
Also it may be useful to consider some other studies that have been published in the meantime about the event's scale and severity relative to past and projections. This may also support phrasing the aim of the analysis more strongly in a science context.

I am looking forward to seeing the revised manuscript.

Regards
Kerstin

Dear authors,

One reviewer now finds the paper publishable. As the other reviewers could not re-review, I have made some additional suggestions below that are somewhat related to the main reviewer comments about the descriptiveness and lack of strong conclusion. Please consider at least some of them in your final manuscript preparation.

Best regards
Kerstin

‘Descriptive nature of the study’:
As a reader it is indeed difficult to find, which methods were applied. The section entitled ‘Data and Methods’ does not contain any methods regarding the ‘drought analysis’ approach taken, i.e.
- What exactly was done with each index-dataset to analyse and describe the drought event?
Please consider adding this more clearly to each data subsection or adding a section with ‘approach of analysis’ or so that lists the approach taken (ranks, visualisation of..., comparison of...for each index) and in particular move the little bits of method description that are contained in the results or in particular the unclassified bit of text under 4 and preceding 4.1 (currently not belonging to a subheading) to the methods.

The conclusion with regard to causality and 'uniqueness' is still a bit unspecific and as a reader one doesn't quite know what the most important thing to remember is. Perhaps this could be improved a bit.

To guarantee impact, I feel the abstract needs to be improved. It is currently rather long and jumpy with introductory sentences and results somewhat overlapping. With respect to the comment above, it also lacks reference to a methodological approach taken on the indices (only ‘...is discussed’, which is very unspecific and can be mistaken to refer to the discussion section). Whereas HESS does not apply a word count rule, the abstract should convey only a short summary of the research without referencing. In particular the last two sentences are not on the research itself but provide referencing and should thus be deleted unless some added value comes from the joint results – i.e. unless an actual result on the research is related to the mentioning, simply referring that other studies are available and a project is being worked on is not justified. A stronger conclusion on the actual topic and outcome of the study presented here would be more correct and more influential in the long-term.

Overall the manuscript has now become much longer (11 Figures prevously, now 15 with more panels). In particular towards the later part of the manuscript the space of figures will outweigh the space for text and I anticipate that placing the figures near the explanatory text at typesetting will thus become tricky. I know, most were added responding to reviewer comments, please check if really all figures are necessary or if some might be reduced to less panels or so in order not to take up full pages.

Figure 1. The lengthy caption texts ‘In this figure...’ (Figs 1-3, 9....) should be deleted, as the legend is sufficient. Perhaps, the perceived need for the long legend illustrates the lack of a proper method description related to how the ranking was done and what it serves in the overall analysis approach in the text!

There are still some unnecessary multi-letter variable names such as Tmax. Please read the manuscript preparation instructions on symbols of the journal carefully and change to notation with subscript where possible.

Dear Monica and coauthors,
thanks a lot for the great effort with the revisions. I am sure the paper will be well received by the community.
Best regards
Kerstin