Dear authors,

The manuscript has been evaluated by two reviews, and you provided adequate responses on how to address the reviews. I decided for "major revisions" because I want to send out the revised manuscript again to the reviewers for feedback, but think that this round of re-review should be comparably short.

Please submit your revised manuscript and a cover letter that describes how you addressed the major points raised by the reviewers. Also, please provide a version of the revised manuscript in which the changes are highlighted, so that these can be more easily be seen.

Note that I took over the editing of this manuscript from Christian Reick and will continue as your editor for this submission.

I am looking forward to the revised manuscript.

Kind regards,
Axel Kleidon
(editor)

Dear authors,

Your manuscript was re-reviewed by a third reviewer. This reviewer raised some concerns similar to one of the reviewers of the first round, namely that the causality of your results in some parts of the manuscript are not sufficiently attested and discussed. This reviewer recommended rejection as the reviewer considered the current version far from being acceptable for publication, but encouraged to resubmit after these issues are addressed.

The concern of the reviewer particularly refers to section 3.3. I agree with the reviewers assessment that this section takes an approach that is too simple to interpret RH changes in terms of evaporation changes. Correlation does not imply causation, especially when dealing with the hydrologic cycle with its very tight linkages between evaporation, humidity, and precipitation. Also note that the aerodynamic term in evaporation is typically quite small, and evaporation is predominantly limited by energy. So it is unclear to me what the correlation between RH and evaporation is supposed to imply.

Furthermore, at the moment, Section 5 merely summarizes the findings, but they are not conclusions. I think there is more to say from your results, so more work should be done on formulating what the analysis actually implies regarding the causes for RH trends.

I apologize for the long time it took to come to an editorial decision, but this was unavoidable as I needed to familiarize myself with the analysis in the manuscript and the concern of the reviewers in greater depth to get my own impression.

I do not go as far as rejecting this manuscript as recommended by the reviewer. I ask you to substantially revise your manuscript to address the concerns. It will then be re-evaluated by the reviewers to check whether the concerns were sufficiently addressed to be acceptable.

I am looking forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Axel Kleidon
ESD Editor

Dear authors,

First, I like to apologize for the delay in reaching a decision on your manuscript.

The third reviewer re-evaluated the manuscript and is now more positive about your paper. However, the reviewer also finds your paper very long and tedious, and I share this assessment. As the reviewer points out, it is likely to stop readers from reading the whole paper, which I consider to be a substantial objection to accepting it in present form.

I therefore ask you to go through another round of revision and substantially shorten your paper (to at least reduce the length by 1/3) and focus on the main results and insights. This version will then need to be re-evaluated, hopefully for the last time.

I look forward to the revised version of the manuscript.

Kind regards,
Axel Kleidon

Dear authors,

Your manuscript has now been re-reviewed by one of the reviewers and was suggested for acceptance. I also thank you for your efforts in shortening the manuscript by reducing the text and the number of figures. I am therefore happy to accept your manuscript for publication.

Thank you also for your patience during the long review process. Despite the time it took, I do think that the review process helped to improve the manuscript and sharpened the focus, so it was well worth the effort.

Best regards,
Axel Kleidon