Dear Dr Grant,

Many thanks for your detailed responses to the three referee reports. From these, it appears that you have been able to adequately address all points raised, and I look forward to receive the final version of the manuscript.

Best wishes,
Jens-Arne Subke

Dear Dr Grant,

Many thanks for the revised manuscript which is now in good shape for publication. The only area where I think some improvements are needed is for some of the figures.

Figure 1 is quite difficult to unpick. I appreciate that there are many things going on across the phase boundaries and in vertical compartments. Is it possible to avoid the dark background and reduce occurrences of overlapping text? I did not initially grasp the vertical separation (red lines) into soil, water and air (i.e. that yellow labels at the bottom referred to these). The fact that text is quite pixelated also means that smaller letters (subscripts) are virtually illegible. I would request that you attempt to make this figure clearer, as it is central to the model you present.

Other figures are generally good, but there is some imbalance in font size between axis titles, axis tick marks and legends/symbol size. Text throughout the figures should be of similar size – in most cases here I think that you can reduce the font size of axis titles. If within-figure legend text can be increased, as well as symbol size (where meaningful and ensuring that time series are still clear) this would also be good to change.

I hope you can agree to these final changes.

Best wishes,
Jens-Arne Subke