Dear Sungmin O and Ulrich Foelsche,

Thank you for posting your responses to the two referees’ reports. The reviews are quite favorable, but they also raised some important comments and suggestions that I urge you to consider as I have confident that they will improve the quality of the manuscript. Based on my own reading, I find this to be an interesting paper that fits the scope of HESS well and will be of interest to the community.

In regards to the comment made by the second referee on the spatial correlation analysis (comment B1) - I tend to agree with the reviewer that it will make more sense to use anisotropic correlation model (even with a cutoff distance of 15 km). Please consider doing so. At least it will contribute to the discussion about the spatial correlation at this scale.

I invite you to upload a revised manuscript, incorporating the proposed changes and additions, and making any other modifications where you see fit (‘publish subject to revisions’). I look forward to receiving the revised manuscript.

Sincerely,
Nadav Peleg

Dear Sungmin O,

I have now received the reports from two reviewers. While one reviewer (#2) is satisfied with the revised manuscript, the second reviewer (#1) filed a rather critical report. Some of the comments made by the reviewer are new, while others repeat for the second time (i.e. the reviewer was not satisfied by the corrections/answers to some of his/her comments from the first revision round). Please answer the comments made by the reviewer and revised the manuscript once again. I have confidence that the quality of the manuscript will be improved by carefully answering the comments made by the reviewer and revising the paper. I am looking forward to receiving the revised manuscript.

Best regards,
Nadav Peleg

Dear Sungmin O and Ulrich Foelsche,

Thank you for posting your response to the comments made by the reviewer and for revising your manuscript. I found the present version of the text much improved in comparison to the original submission. Reading the manuscript, I believe it to be almost ready for publication. I have some minor comments I kindly ask you to address, detailed below. My main comment is that the last Section (6. Discussion and conclusions) should be revised and shorten. In Sections 3 to 5, there is a mix of results and discussion already - why another Section of discussion is needed? In addition, most of the text in Section 6 simply repeats the findings and part of the discussion presented before (please see some specific comments below). To keep the conclusions concise, please consider moving most of the discussion from Section 6 to Sections 3 to 5 and eliminating unnecessary repetitions.

Specific comments
[1 19-20] I am not so sure that the results can be claimed to be general. Consider withdrawing/rephrasing this sentence. In addition, it is not supported in the text – there is no discussion about the generalization of the results beyond this sentence.
[4 2] What happened after 2016?
[4 4-5] Some further (basic) information is needed here. The most important - how did you treat an error measurement for a given rain gauge? Is it simply given a NAN value?
[4 7] What was the value of the power parameter? At which time scale did you interpolate? Please provide further information.
[4 19] Genoa Lows. Please add a reference.
[6 25] Please present Appendix A and B as Supplementary Material, i.e. both should be moved to a separate file (not part of the main text).
[8 9-10] Also see https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhydrol.2016.05.033 Maybe of relevant.
[8 16] Usually Fig, 9 appear before Fig. 10... Consider revising the order of the figures.
[8 24-25] A reference is needed.
[8 27-31] It will be much more interesting to see this distribution at sub-daily scale, e.g. at hourly temporal resolution.
[9 2-5] Should be in the introduction section.
[9 15-17] Repetitive.
[9 23-25] Repetitive.
[10 1-3] Repetitive.
[10 6-7] Why repeating the results?

Dear Sungmin O and Ulrich Foelsche,

Thank you for revising the manuscript once again. After reading the revised manuscript, I am pleased to inform you that your manuscript has now been accepted for publication in HESS.

Thank you for your contribution and best regards,
Nadav Peleg