Thanks to the reviewers for the valuable comments and to the authors for the constructive responses. Based on this discussion, I am confident that the authors will be able to utilize the comments to improve their manuscript.

Reviewer 1 has two major suggestions, including more variables and looking at temporal aspects in more detail. While both are interesting and relevant, I here would tend to agree with the authors response, namely that the former might extend the study too far, but the latter would be a valuable addition, which would clearly strenghten the manuscript.

Re Fig 3, I agre with the reviewer that the color scheme/Scale is subotpimal as differences are hard to see.

I am looking forward to the revised version of this manuscript. Please pay close attention to all the reviewer comments.

Best regards,
Jan Seibert

Thanks for your careful revision. Besides a few minor points, see below, I now find your manuscript acceptable for publication in HESS.

Best regards,
Jan Seibert

Minor comments:

P4L8: This document is structured as follows. The study area is presented in Sect. 2, the datasets and methods are described in
Sect. 3, the results are shown in Sect. 4 and the main conclusions are summarized in Sect. 6.
Delete

P24L25: Note that for the sake of simplification, some of the smaller river basins have been grouped.
Move to figure caption

P5L11: They should have a weak horizontal gradient, especially for precipitation
Clarify whether you mean at least some gradient or at most a small gradient (weak seems not the right word here, see also p6l5)

P7L5: but guaranteeing the even 5 distribution of the
Stations
Please shortly mention how this was done

P13L2: SAFRAN and Spain02 have very similar scores, although the latter generally surpasses the former.
This reads as a contradiction, perhaps add ‘slightly’ in the end of the sentence

Thanks for you efforts with the final changes. I now find this contribution ready for publication in HESS.

Best regards,
Jan Seibert