We thank the reviewer for taking the time to evaluate the manuscript and for recognizing that the technical work is decent, promising and useful. We address key points below.

1. We recognize the need to place the current work within the broader context of coupled climate and Earth System modeling at GFDL and worldwide. We agree that there is a rich history of Earth System Model development at many climate centers worldwide, including GFDL and the manuscript did not make it clear that this study is focusing on extending numerical weather prediction systems to include Earth system interactions that have traditionally been represented by fully coupled decadal-to-centennial ESMs.
   
   
   
   We agree that the broader context needs to be strengthened and we have made substantial revisions to the introduction to clarify how the present work fits within ongoing efforts at GFDL and elsewhere to extend numerical weather prediction and existing coupling methodologies. Specifically, we expanded the introduction to discuss related land–atmosphere coupling approaches used in other Earth system and numerical weather prediction models, highlight how our work builds upon these efforts, and clarify the specific methodological contribution of this study. These additions provide the appropriate scholarly context while preserving the paper's primary focus on the methodology, implementation, and evaluation of the new coupling framework for analyzing surface water extremes associated with Hurricane Helene.
   
   
   
   
2. We added a direct coupled-vs-uncoupled comparison against NCEP Stage IV observed precipitation, with both configurations initialized from the same GFS analysis. This shows the coupled and uncoupled storm tracks and precipitation fields are nearly indistinguishable from one another and both compare well against Stage IV observations. This provides evidence that two-way land coupling does not measurably alter storm evolution on this event's timescale, and that the observed heavy-rainfall region over the Appalachians is captured in both configurations.
   
   
   
   We revised the language throughout the results and conclusion to reflect the qualitative nature of the hydrological evaluation. For example, the hydrology results section now explicitly states that the results provide evidence the land model and its coupling "are behaving as expected from a qualitative perspective," and that "further work is underway to quantitatively evaluate the model's performance against observations." We removed or qualified the stronger validation language elsewhere in the text.
   
   
   
   A comprehensive quantitative verification of hydrological forecast skill against observations (e.g., streamflow gauges and soil moisture networks) is beyond the scope of this paper and is now stated explicitly in the manuscript. Such an evaluation is ongoing and will be presented in future work.
   
   
   
   
3. We appreciate the reviewer identifying the remaining typos and inconsistencies. These are corrected in the revised manuscript.
   
   
   
   
4. The simulation data were already publicly available in the same Zenodo repository as the code. The original data corresponded to the Version 2 release, which may not have been immediately apparent. For the revised manuscript, we have uploaded the additional simulation data associated with the new analyses and created a Version 3 release with an updated Zenodo DOI to ensure that the code and data corresponding to this manuscript are clearly identified.

We thank the referee for the careful review and thoughtful comments. We appreciate the positive assessment of the technical contribution and the recognition that the coupled SHiELD-LM4 framework represents a valuable step toward a fully implicit land-atmosphere-ocean modeling system. We revise the manuscript accordingly and address each comment below.

Major comments:

1. We agree that the introduction should better motivate the scientific importance of land surface processes and place this work within the broader modeling landscape. In the revised manuscript, we expand the Introduction to discuss the role of land–atmosphere interactions in weather and Earth system prediction, particularly for extreme events where land surface states influence boundary layer evolution, surface fluxes, and hydrological processes. We also add a discussion of related coupled modeling frameworks to better contextualize our design choices. We emphasize that the primary contribution of this work is not the introduction of land-atmosphere coupling itself, but rather the implementation of the implicit coupling strategy within the fully coupled SHiELD modeling framework using the FMS Coupler infrastructure.
   
   
   
   
2. Great question. In the current implementation, u_star is computed in the MOST scheme and is held constant outside the implicit solver of temperature and moisture, so the actual exchange coefficients are treated explicitly, while the thermodynamic fluxes are treatedreated implicitly. This design follows the existing atmospheric surface-layer implementation in ESM4 and avoids introducing additional dependencies within the solver.
   
   The implicit timestep updates thermodynamic quantities while using a consistent value of u_star during each coupling timestep, therefore the resulting fluxes remain consistent within each iteration. This follows the logic introduced in Held I. (2004).
   
   As noted in section 3.1, we assume that surface fluxes of momentum and other tracers have no implicit dependence on surface parameters. Nonetheless, the implicit strategy could be easily extended for momentum and other tracers which may become important in future implementations for high resolution configurations.
   
   We have added additional discussion to clarify this design choice and its implications.
   
   
   
   - Held, I. M. (2004). Surface fluxes, implicit time stepping, and the exchange grid: The structure of the surface exchange module (Technical Report). NOAA Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18090279
   
   
   
   
3. We appreciate the suggestion. We added a comparison between coupled and uncoupled SHiELD version as well as comparison to observational data to highlight that coupling to land does not affect the storm structure nor its characteristics. We would refrain from adding additional comparisons as the primary objective of this manuscript is to describe the development and implementation of the implicit LM4 coupling infrastructure within SHiELD and to demonstrate its numerical robustness and physical realism in a realistic weather simulation.
   
   A comprehensive evaluation against observations, as well as systematic comparisons with the previous explicit implementation across multiple cases, would substantially broaden the scope of the paper. Such analyses are currently being pursued as separate, ongoing research initiatives.
   
   We have also added discussion clarifying the objectives and limitations of the present study and explicitly identify comprehensive model validation and intercomparison as future work.
   
   
   
   

Minor comments:

1. Land and ocean initial conditions are taken from a SPEAR run as described in section 4. The land components are already spun up and their corresponding conditions/configurations are left unchanged. We add additional text to further clarify this point.
2. Corrected
3. Corrected
4. The stacked layers shown here are actually horizontal layers indexed by the vertically descending coordinate index ‘k’
5. Corrected
6. Corrected
7. Corrected
8. Corrected