Dear Conrad and co-authors

Thank you for your detailed replies to the comments from 3 reviewers. I have now had time to review the comments and your replies and I invite you to upload a suitably revised manuscript for another round of review (by a smaller number of reviewers).

Thank you,
Chris Still

Dear Conrad and co-authors,

Thank you for your thorough responses to reviewer comments and associated revisions to your manuscript. As noted by one reviewer, you "have made substantial efforts to address all of the most pressing reviewer comments, and have greatly improved the clarity and readability of the manuscript. The figures are also much easier to interpret, and thus, more informative." Given the very positive response of this and of a second reviewer, I am pleased to accept your revised manuscript for publication in Biogeosciences once you have addressed the minor comments from the first reviewer (copied below).

Best wishes,
Chris Still


"I have only a few remaining minor comments on the revised version:

Figure 1B – This might be more clear as “Comparison of several (scaled) soil moisture declines demonstrating a range of Nash-Sutcliffe-Efficiencey (NSE) scores compared to an artificial (“ideal”) reference step.”

Pg7 L11 – the assumption that hydraulic redistribution processes ‘remain active during the day’ strikes me as an unrealistic assumption if the fluxes are plant mediated. If there is some purely physical water movement (capillary flow from a saturated layer, downward flow from a higher soil layer) this might be true, but plant-mediated ‘hydraulic redistribution’ decreases markedly as soon as the plant water potentials begin to fall in the morning (because the water potential gradient drives water up the plant rather than out of the roots).


Pg13 L1 – Perhaps it’s worth including one sentence of interpretation here rather than just turning readers loose on the Appendix. Something like “Although higher RWU fluxes were generally associated with more step-like soil moisture shapes and higher NSEs, there were still a number of high RWU days at both sites with poor NSEs, indicating additional complicating factors beyond higher detection with higher fluxes (Appendix Fig. B1).”

Fig 8 & Pg16 L6-12– it looks like most of the ‘simplified RWU’ calculations are actually larger than the hydraulic redistribution-corrected fluxes. Does this mean that most nightly trends were actually negative (rather than positive as shown in Fig 2)? If this is the case, it seems like it is not actually hydraulic redistribution that is at play, but rather refilling of plant capacitance or some such subtle overnight water withdrawal."