Dear Authors,

Thank you for your thoughtful responses to the two reviews of your manuscript. I can see that the majority of the issues raised have been addressed, thought there are two aspects that remain troubling.
The first is the use of a two-month cumulative response function. This seems to be a highly subjective choice, and although it is shown to work in the studied systems it is likely that it would not extrapolate to other systems high-energy water-limited environments ( e.g., dry tropical ecosystems, or pulse driven water limited ecosystems). I would therefore suggest changing the title to reflect the fact that the approach developed is for Mediterranean ecosystems.
The second is your argumentation that you have not used vapor pressure deficit (VPD) as an input in the model because you "tried to maintain a model with minimal input data that will be available from standard weather stations (VPD information is currently lacking from most of the weather stations in this region)", while acknowledging that VPD is indeed a limitation. Although I'm a firm believer in parsimony, some simplifications are just too simple. VPD clearly has a strong on fluxes, and because of this it is incorporated in the majority of prognostic and diagnostic modeling approaches. It may not be commonly measured at your sites, but it is quite easily inferred from measurements of relative humidity, which surely must be. So this is not a very good excuse. I realize however that you hope that the current met drivers included could serve as some kind of proxy for VPD, but would encourage you in future work to consider VPD in order to avoid mis-attribution of your results to other drivers.

Apart from those two issues, congratulations on a excellent contribution and best of luck in your future work.

Best wishes,
Trevor

Dear authors,

Thank you for making the revisions to your manuscript. I am happy to say that we can now accept it for publication in Biogeosciences.

Best wishes, and good luck with your future work,

Trevor