Dear Dr. Brigode,

Thank you very much for answering the concerns expressed by the reviewers related to the initial version of the manuscript. Both reviewers identified the value of your study and suggested some avenues to improve the manuscript towards a final paper. Their concerns were clearly expressed and in my evaluation your responses indicate that you will be able to address them in a revised version.
Although the revisions required are rather related to the presentation and clarity of the manuscript, I am recommending here the consideration after major revisions to allow one reviewer to evaluate the revised version again.

Please, submit a revised version of the manuscript, which will be sent out again to one of the original reviewers for final evaluation.

Best regards,

Eduardo Zorita

Dear Dr. Brigode,

one of the reviewers of your manuscript, who had signaled an interest in reviewing the revised version, has declined the invitation. The other reviewer had previously recommended minor revisions of the manuscript. Since it is usually quite difficult to identify a reviewer that is willing to overtake the review process from other reviewer, and considering that your manuscript falls almost completely in my area of expertise, I have evaluated directly the revised version in order to speed up the review process.
I am returning the manuscript to you for a few minor revisions, as explained below.

Sincerely,

Eduardo Zorita


In my evaluation, this version addresses the concerns and suggestions of the two previous reviewers, but I have spotted some minor points that you may want to condenser to include in the final version:

1. You may way want to cite the previous paper of mine (Schenk and Zorita, Climate of the Past doi:10.5194/cp-8-1681-2012) as it is directly related to the reconstruction method you are using in this manuscript.


2. Page 2 line 10. There seems to be something missing in this sentence

'and highlighting significant natural variability at the decadal Montanari (2012) stated ..'


3. Page 4 , line 29.
I am aware that one of the previous reviewers requested a more detailed explanation of the concept of geopotential height, but I disagree with the reviewer on this point. I do not think it is necessary and that it distorts the overall text flow, but I leave it to your decision to keep or delete this paragraph.

'For example, if a station reports that the 500 hPa height
at its location is 5600 meters, it means that the level of the atmosphere over that station at which the atmospheric pressure is 500 hPa is 5600 meters above sea level (example from the NOAA’s National Weather Service).'


4 Page 5, line 11

' see section 3.1.1 for more details'

section 3.1.1 does not exist. I think it should read 3.1 or maybe 3.3


5. Page 15, line 37

'Averaging each ensemble of the considered 20CR members
(blue points) results in better temporal correlations at the daily and yearly resolutions, but at the expense of lower variability reproduction performance.'

The last part of the sentence is unclear. I think you mean 'at the expense of a too small reconstructed variability '


6. Section 4.3.2 Correlation Centennial mean annual flow reconstructions (1881-2011)

I think it would be interesting to include in the description of the results the correlation - or other measure of similarity - between the observed run-off and the tree-ring reconstructed run-off


7. The caption of figure 10 is not correct. It is a repetition of caption 9. Caption 10 should refer to the spring run-off reconstruction and the comparison with Boucher (2015) .

Dear Dr. Brigode,

thank you very much for addressing my last suggestions. I am now happy to recommend the publication of your manuscript in Climate of the Past

Sincerely,

Eduardo Zorita