Dear authors,
thank you for the revision of your manuscript. Most of the reviewer comments are addressed now, but there are a few points that still need to be taken care of:

One of the reviewers issued the following suggestions:
"The revised paper has improved and the authors addressed most of my concerns. I still have one concern with regard to whether the new parameterization improves the model's performance globally: the authors showed in reply that a version with the new scheme has better performance. However, the added point in the discussion should include the conclusion from the evaluations in Schellekens et al. (2017), instead of simply saying it is "being evaluated".
Minor comment: One of the added sentence "Conceivably improved runoff to the sea surrounding the UK influencing sea surface salinity could influence meteorological forecasts in the UK" is too complicated. I would suggest rewording/breaking into two sentences."

Additionally, a few minor corrections/ additions in the text should be considered:
- Page 2, line 2: Could you also think of other (additional) reasons, why an improved runoff prediction would be beneficial for a coupled system?
- Section 3.2 and Figure 5: I think the tests on the spatially-varying slope-dependent b parameter are mentioned in the methods sections and corresponding results are shown in Figure 5, but these results are not acknowledged in the text. Considered adding a few words on these experiments in the results section.
- Page 9, line 10: Please remove the 'do' or reformulate the sentence.
- Page 15, line 2: Complicated sentence. Consider reformulating.

Kind regards,
Wolfgang Kurtz

Dear authors,

thank you for your revision. Your modifications sufficiently addressed the reviewer comments, so I'm pleased to accept your manuscript for final publication in GMD.

Kind regards,
Wolfgang Kurtz