Dear Dr. Biemans

Thanks for providing answers to all comments brought up by the two referees of your manuscript entitled “Crop-specific seasonal estimates of irrigation water demand in South Asia”.

Please revise the manuscript according to your response and the suggested modifications. Depending on the revised version I may ask the reviewers for an evaluation of the modified version.

Sincerely

Christian Stamm

Dear Dr. Biemans

Thanks for the revised manuscript entitled “Crop-specific seasonal estimates of irrigation water demand in South Asia”.

I appreciate the efforts you have put into addressing the points raised by the reviews, which includes running additional simulations for the model without multiple-cropping. In my view, your revision provides good responses to the critique. There a few minor issues though that should be improved before I can accept the manuscript for publication. I list them below:

- Description and discussion of the single-cropping model run: in your response, you explain what you actually did (“LPJmL was run with the single cropping landuse input as in previous model studies by the authors (Biemans et al, 2013) and sowing date was determined based on climate as in Waha et al (2012).“). I cannot find this information in the revised version, though. This has be added in the method section.

Additionally, you neglect this result in the results section and you are rather brief on that aspect also in the discussion. There you only introduced a single sentence. I asked myself whether such a strikingly different pattern between the two model versions is not worth a bit more discussion. Should one not elaborate more on consequences for interpreting earlier results from models that neglected the multiple-cropping aspect? I have the impression Fig. 5 is a very strong result that you should make use of in a more pronounced manner. But this is an aspect that you as authors have to decide.

- The notion of “Zaid season”: it was proposed by the first reviewer to clarify that what you call the summer season is also called the Zaid season. You argue that this inclusion would cause confusion. However, my experience when reading the text was different. Actually, I could imagine that you avoid confusion if you state in the text at one point that what you call summer season corresponds to the Zaid season. Please reconsider this aspect.

- Reviewer 2 asked for some clarification regarding the calibration process and the meaning of the word “plot” in this context. You nicely explain this in your reply but did not include that in the manuscript. I also not sure what you mean by “plot” and suggest you include your explanation in the text.

In addition to these comments, I add two issues from my side:

- Correct units for water fluxes: Please use coherent units for all water fluxes that express them as volume per time (see HESS guidelines: “Fluxes, such as precipitation, evaporation, infiltration, percolation, or runoff, are always expressed as a flux, expressed in L3 T–1 or L T–1 if the flux is per unit area. Even if fluxes are accumulated over a period of time, the period of integration needs to be reflected in the denominator (e.g. mm/year).”

Please report water abstraction and the like as “BCM/yr” instead of “BCM” in the text.

- Explain units in Fig. 4. I assume that “T FM/ha” stands for “tons of fresh matter per ha”. Please explain in the caption.

- Fig. 5: Some of the different colours are hard to distinguish. Can you improve on that?

- Fig. 6: You may consider replacing “M6 – 10” by “June to Oct” and “M11 – 3” by “Nov. to March”). This is probably more reader friendly for people who are not too much into the topic but may still wish to read your paper.

Sincerely

Christian Stamm

As you have suggested you may check the final colours of Fig. 5 with final version.

Christian Stamm