Dear authors,

I have revised the discussion and content of the original manuscript and would like to invite you to submit a new version after minor-to-moderate revision. The manuscript presents an interesting application of a novel tool to two atmospheric river events of particular socio-economic relevance. While all reviewer evaluations acknowledge the value of this work, the mild concerns they raise are legitimate, as the authors acknowledge in their response. I find of particular interest to include some discussion about advantages and disadvantages of the tool, even if the purpose of this article is not to present the method.

In addition, I would advice to give a bit more structure to the current manuscript. For instance, the authors could consider the separation of Methods into subsections describing the tool and the two test cases. It strikes me in particular that only one and a half pages of text in draft version separate Methods from Conclusion. I assume that the incorporation of the reviewer comments will extend Results and Discussion. Yet, the authors may want to consider the partitioning of this section, perhaps in two sub-sections each focused on one event, to again give it some more structure to the manuscript.

As a side comment: please make sure the colormaps in Fig. 6 and 7 are updated to reflect all the colors now displayed in this figures.

Looking forward to receiving the updated version.

Kind regards,

Prof. Diego G. Miralles

Dear authors,

I reviewed the new submission, and I acknowledge the feedback provided by the reviewers has been accommodated successfully. There are a few remaining aspects that require your attention before the manuscript can be accepted. These are all minor issues, mostly typos, that I enumerate here:

– Abstract: 'Vertical cross sections of the moisture (content?) suggest'.
– Low-level jet (LLJ) for 'Low-Level Jet (LLJ)'
– Remove the added 'have' at 'Guan and Waliser (2015) have developed a global detection method'. Specially if this follows as 'More recently, Eiras-Barca et al. (2016) proposed' (in past tense).
– 'Into the mid latitudes' for 'into mid latitudes'.
– There are over 20 acronyms in the article. Please revise if you could be a bit more benevolent to the readers; especially to those that do not have a meteorology background. Perhaps acronyms such as TME (used three times), SLP (used only once and undefined), or TCS (only used in two captions) could be spelled out.
– Correct 'Avelino, A. and Dall?erba, S.’.
– Revise grammar at '...with the uncertainty in the “real word” is due to the WRF model error'.
– 'WRF Single-Moment 6-Class Mycrophysics Scheme (WSMC6) microphysics scheme'. The second 'microphysics scheme' is not needed. The first use of ‘microphysics' has a typo.
– Section 2.3 should have a more specific title than 'Methods', since the tracer tool is also a method. Maybe 'WRF simulation settings', or similar.
– 'good quality statuin' (?)
– 'despite the fact that precipitation is known to be the most difficult parameter'. Precipitation is not a parameter. Also add 'arguably' somewhere; now the statement feels awkwardly categorical.
– 'The reason for the latter is shown in Figure 1' for 'The reason is shown in Figure 1'.
– '90% of the precipitable water in some points’, change 'points' for 'areas' or similar.
– Correct 'montainous'.
– 'Figure 7.b shows 24h-accumulated percentage of precipitation'. Add ‘the' before '24'.
– Missing space at 'per day(Buishand...'.
– The colors in Figure 5 and 6 are still not reflected in the colormap. Please fix.
– Correct 'water stored vapor'.
– 'a larger amount of cases' for 'more cases'.
– Correct the sentences that are repeated in the last paragraph of the Conclusion.

Finally, I still feel that the text in Results and Discussion is rather succinct (less than 1000 words). This means the core of the paper will span less than one page (excluding figures) in the final manuscript (one page is around 1200 words). While this is not an important issue, it does not seem to scale with the number of figures and the amount of information they contain.

Kind regards,
Prof. Diego Miralles