Dear authors,

Thank you for your response to the reviewers. From these, it appears you have additional background information that addresses some of the concerns raised. Please include such info in the revised paper directly, or as supplemental material.

I noted that in your replies to Dr. Mattila's comments you appeared to be in full agreement with them, but very often claimed the comment or any elaboration of the paper based upon it would be outside the scope of your study. To me this suggests that perhaps the focus of the paper is too narrow, and not addressing these concerns here could substantially limit the contribution of your paper. I therefore urge you to carefully study those comments again and explore ways to address them here. The third comment for example offers an alternative to your crop model that is not very complicated and does not require additional data. If your claim that you cannot implement it in your model is correct, I think it is not unfeasible to test it on a few locations and for one or two crops, to see how these two models compare locally, on the scale of individual fields. If differences are small, you can conclude the models are in agreement. If the differences are large, any local data available would allow you to see which model performed best. If your model turns out not to be so good you still have the option of not implementing the alternative, but you need to include a statement to indicate a possible model structure error. Alternatively, you take some more time and implement it after all, and end up with a better model.

Basically, valid comments and suggestions for improvement may indeed be outside the scope of the paper, but the onus is on the authors to make the current paper the best it can be. When too many things are both worth pursuing and outside the scope of the current paper, the paper probably is not quite ready yet.

That being said, the overall impression of the reviewers is positive and both reviews are very constructive and offer many useful suggestions. I therefore believe you have enough material to work with to make meaningful amendments to your paper. Please go ahead and revise the paper as needed.

Yours sincerely,

Gerrit de Rooij
Editor

Dear Drs. Zhuo, Mekonnen, and Hoekstra,

I asked one of the reviewers of your original contribution to have a look at your revision. I am happy to let you know that we both believe you substantially improved your contribution. The reviewer mentions a few points. One of them is a typo that is easily corrected, another requires an additional sentence or two. If you address these I think the paper is ready for publication.

Yours sincerely,

Gerrit de Rooij