In your Author response document, the response to Rihab Mechri is the same as Benoit Coudert. Please fix this, and i will go through your comments and make a decision.

Dear authors,

I have carefully reviewed your replies to the comments, and have reviewed your paper myself. While the comments are fairly positive about your work, the paper in it's current form is not suitable for publication in GMD for the following reasons:

1. Your paper does Not have a concise discussion section, which links your results back to the existing literature. You simply have a very short Results section, followed by a Conclusion. Having a discussion section is basic requirement for any paper.

2. Your simulations only cover a very short period, at one site. This is clearly not sufficient to show a significant advancement to the model. At the very least, results over at least one complete seasonal cycle (not just one week). You only show results at one site and refer to your PhD thesis for the Kruger site. The evaluation of advancements to LSMs should be carried out at a range of sites, not just one or two. There are many FLUXNET stations available.

3. You continually refer to your PhD thesis for more detail. This is not appropriate. You cannot expect a reader to go read your whole PhD thesis, and try to extract the relevant information.

4. The explanation of your results is too broad and lacks detail.

You are welcome to re-submit a revised manuscript only if you are prepared to fully address the above issues. See attached for more comments.

Kind Regards,
Jatin

On Page 2- lines 21 and 25, page 3 line 8, and possibly elsewhere, you use the phrase “In some_reference (yyyy)”, which reads a bit odd. Rather, simply rephrase to: “Huang et al. (2003) developed a one-dimensional….”, rather than “In Huang et al. (2003) the authors developed a one-dimensional ….”. Fix this throughout the manuscript.

Page 4, line 9, should be “Dufresne et al. (2013)”.

Page 4, line 19, years need to be in brackets for in text references???

Section 4.4.3 – Merge these short paragraphs into one or two paragraphs.

What is the point of showing Multiplying factors in Table 1, when these all have a value of 1. Can’t you just state that in the text? What’s the point of showing that you use the same multiplying factor for all these parameters in a Table? This should be removed from Table 1 as it’s not providing any useful information. You’ve already stated this in the text.

Figure 3 – What is this “REMPLACER CHAPEAU PAR HAT”????