Dear Authors,

while the referees both see the scientific significance of this manuscript, they also both find that the scientific quality can be improved and recommend reconsideration of the manuscript after major revisions.
Please revise your manuscript according to their comments and suggestions.

Additionally, a few more detailed recommendations:
As both referees agree on the fact that the description of the methodology should be improved I also recommend adding at sketch, as suggested by referee #2.
Referee #1 asks whether or not the measurements of drip rates are representative, please provide a short discussion of this.
Referee #1 suggests showing higher resolved time series of ET and I agree that it would be helpful to show hourly or even higher resolved values instead of daily values here.
Referee #1 asks for an explanation of the term "negative hydraulic lift" and I am also thinking that you mistakenly mixed the two terms "hydraulic lift", which normally refers to movement of water from the roots into the soil, and "negative sapflow". Please check and clarify.
From your responses to the specific comments #1 and #4 of referee #2 it is not clear how you intend to revise your manuscript. Please add the recommended points to the discussion as suggested. Please also add more quantification of the identified relationships and their significance to section 4.2.5. Solar driven daily cycles of vegetative (phreatophytic) evapotranspiration.
And again I would like to come back to my original suggestion of a slightly more detailed time lag analysis applying ccf or similar to all the periods with diurnal oscillations - comparing drip rates either with the temperature time series or with a time series of hourly (or 15 minute) ET. Then you would obtain a lag time and a correlation value for each of these periods (this could be presented in a plot or a table) and it would be possible to see if these values are dependent for example on the season or if they are mainly site specific.

Looking forward to your revised manuscript,
Theresa Blume

Dear Authors,
I agree with the referees that you have improved your manuscript significantly and I am positive that we will be able to publish it as soon as you made a few minor revisions as suggested by the referees and myself. Please find my suggestions below.
Best regards,
Theresa Blume

Lag time analysis: could the lag also be >24 hours? Please discuss and check.
Did you try shifting the time series for > 24 hours, i.e. several days? Are the results the same?
Please indicate if the correlations in table 2 are significant (by adding a star or putting them in bold letters), or if they are all significant say so in the caption. I would keep the table in its current detail and not cumulate the values to averages as suggested by Reviewer 2.

I would call Figure 2 a table, not a figure. I am not sure if this was meant by the reviewer when asking for a sketch. I think that sketch was supposed to help explain to people who aren’t experts in signal processing the steps happening when running the analysis with the toolbox. Would it be possible to provide something like that? If it is not possible to provide such a sketch, very briefly state the different steps within the SST analysis (1 or 2 sentences). If I understand correctly (I am not expert) this is a “sharpening” of a wavelet transform – so to point out the advantage over the wavelet transform it might also be helpful to put those two plots next to each other. That way people can directly see how the CWT “transforms” into the SST and how much more helpful the SST is. I agree with the reviewer that in its current state Figure 2 is basically just text and could be also moved to the text (most of it is in the text already anyway). Also, some parts of this table are not really helpful in understanding the methods (e.g. step 1 or the remark about the color scale).

Figure 6: remove 96pt from the legend or explain it if you find it necessary. “Daily moving average” might be more directly understood.

Figure 7:add unit (years) to the last three plots. Is this supposed to be the age of the trees? Then maybe change the zero to 1 and write “age: 1 year” into the figure.
Figure 7: does it mean something different if the root is accessing the blue part of the storage or just the grey part? If yes please explain, if not it might be helpful to make this similar in the different sketches.
Figure 7: do you really mean hydraulic lift? Or just root water uptake? If you just meant root water uptake do not call it hydraulic lift – see my earlier remarks about this.
Figure 7: sometimes the blue area fills a larger fraction of the box than in other plots (c and d) – does this mean the storages are filled to a different extent? If not, please keep it consistent.
Figure 7: I would add a key word as a header to the different sketches and maybe arrows to show which ones you are supposed to compare. Otherwise you automatically start comparing a) and c) because they are right next to each other, this can cause confusion. Examples for such headers: short flow path, long flow path, large storage, small storage, low uptake, high uptake,…
l.525: could this also be the result of compensation as the preferred storage providing water for root uptake dries out and the tree has to shift uptake to wherever water is still available (probably at greater depth)? This would mean the roots were already present at this depth and were put to use once it became necessary. Can we really attribute this strong change between May and August solely to root growth? Assuming a linear relationship this would mean a shortening of the flow path to 1/3 of the original length so an increase in rooting depth by a factor of 3. I know this is just a very rough calculation, but please make sure if this is really the only and most probably hypothesis.

l.121: what does “well decorated” mean? Please rephrase or explain.

Dear Authors,

the manuscript is definitely improved! However, I still have a few minor points that should be corrected or improved. Please see the comments directly in your text in the pdf. I also suggest another careful round of proof-reading as I have still encountered several spelling and grammatical errors.

Please provide both the revised manuscript and the manuscript that contains the tracked changes - this makes my work a lot easier as I do not have to put so much effort into actually finding your changes to the text.

Best regards,
Theresa Blume

Dear Authors,

we are almost there!

However, this corrected sentence still doesn't really work:
"This is the first indirect observation leading to the hypothesis of tree water use
in cave drip water and has important implications for karst hydrology in regards to
developing a new protocol to determine the relative importance of trends in drip rate, such as diurnal oscillations, and how these trends change over timescales of weeks to years."
Please correct and clarify.

Also: several figure captions still start with "Figure X shows..." - please also change this to "Figure X: ..."

Best regards,
Theresa Blume