Thank you for submitting your responses. I actually agree with the reviewers comments on questioning the suitability and application of the HBV model in this study. The authors have made significant adjustments to the manuscript and have responded in detail, hence I am happy to reconsider the manuscript after major revisions.

Dear authors, thank your for revisions, which have been eliminating most of the concerns by the reviewers. I think the concerns by reviewer 2 are valid and the authors need to be clearer on the use of daily time steps. in particular given the way the abstract and conclusions are written. I do not understand the concept of neutral parameters. Arithmetic means of physical based parameters (even if they are just effective) is non physical. The authors need to explain their approach better.

Thank you very much for your revisions and response. As outlined in the previous decision, this will require an additional review.

Comment 1) use of daily and hourly metrics:
Indeed, focusing on seasonal extreme values (Extr-Su and Extr-Wi) analysed at an hourly time step seems to be a more reasonable approach than analysing only summarized runoff statistics based on daily data. I am still surprised that not much differences are seen but this may require a more detailed analysis exceeding the scope of this paper.

Comment 2) “neutral parameter sets”
I am still not convinced about introducing this term for an arithmetic mean of defined parameter ranges at regional scale. Despite its shortcomings which were not discussed in the manuscript neither in the authors’ reply, in my opinion, use of a common definition “default parameter set” would be more appropriate, particularly because that is what authors mean by their ‘neutral’ parameter set. The authors also state in their response that they do not intended to propose this method for parameter estimation: “We do not attempt to introduce this pragmatic approach as a common approach to estimate parameters…”. This is why they should stick to common terms already used in
hydrology instead of introducing new (potentially misleading) terms which after publication may be used by other researchers. An alternative choice to a default parameter set would be an independent parameter set.

Comment 3) units in days/hours.
The answer is ok, however the major confusion arrives from the fact that the parameters are defined in days whereas the model is run at hourly time step. A single sentence below the table clarifying this issue would solve the problem