In your response to reviewers' comments that lays out your suggestions for revising the manuscript based, you seem to have a good plan for getting the manuscript to the next stage. Thank you for being open to the reviewers' comments! Please follow through on those edits, after which I will review and decide whether it needs to go back out to the referees.

I have two general suggestions:

1. The methods presented in your paper seem to offer considerable promise for new ways to analyze groundwater and surface water phenomena, but perhaps only if future work builds on these methods with greater accounting of the hydrologic physics giving rise to the responses and statistics. Your paper might be strengthened by providing a clearer description of (a) what new knowledge you have been able to provide and (b) what future work is needed to more fully realize the power of the approach.

2. Concerning Referee 2's suggestion that you consider groundwater processes by including some mention of aquifer properties (e.g., transmissivity (T), storativity (S)), I would like to add a little more context and expand the request slightly. Aquifer response to a head perturbation is strongly a function of the ratio T/S, sometimes called the aquifer diffusivity. In confined or semi-confined aquifers this ratio tends to be a thousand times or more greater than in unconfined (water table) aquifers. On the other hand, in confined aquifers, the confining beds can limit connection between a surface perturbation (e.g., from an overlying surface water body) and the underlying aquifer. An exception can occur when a stream incises through a confining bed, potentially causing rapid lateral head response at remarkable distances in the aquifer due to stream stage changes. The key point here is that the responses in groundwater levels can vary greatly depending on the conditions of confinement, or lack thereof. So I would suggest you respond as best you can to Reviewer 2's request to include some information on aquifer properties if possible, but more importantly, include any information you can on the degree of confinement in these aquifer systems. In most alluvial systems there are enough silt or clay beds to at least cause semi-confined conditions. Such knowledge on the basics of groundwater occurrence may provide clues explaining some of your observed statistical results.

I would be happy to discuss this with you further if you wish.

Thank you for so diligently working with the reviewers comments to improve your manuscript!