Dear Jessica et al.,
Thank you for your submission to Geoscience Communication and thank you for your clearly labelled responses to the reviewer’s comments. Based on your detailed responses to the reviewer’s comments, I am recommending that the paper is published subject to minor revisions. I would encourage you to upload a revised version of the article to Geoscience Communication so that an editor can review the article to ensure that the revisions have been made and all fit suitably within the context of the revised article. At present there is no revised version of the paper uploaded to the interactive discussion and whilst I feel satisfied that your responses are detailed, I would prefer to see the article in its entirety as there have evidently been considerable alterations made.
Additional points
1. Whilst I appreciate you may not have the data available to address the question raised by reviewer 2 (1b – how representative are the participants), it could be useful to give a better sense of who the participants were. You state that participants represented Government agencies, public bodies, water utilities companies and not-for-profit organisations; which of the job titles link to which organisation? For example, is the waste water modeller from a public body or a not-for-profit. Similarly, your response to the reviewers comments that the participants who were selected “had long-term experience”; if you have the information available about approximate level of experience of each participant, it might also be useful to include that information. A simple table could include this information and would give the non-hydrology audience of Geoscience Communication a better sense of who the participants represent.

2. It would be useful if you could include the rationale against potential bias that you allude to in your comments to reviewer 2 within the article. E.g. “There was the potential for bias here, however, discussions would often take place in real-life and we did reiterate to participants that the colour they chose should represent what they or their organisation would do with the information. The responses (Fig. 8) do differ between same-group members which suggests that bias was not a major issue.”

Many thanks, I look forward to reviewing your revised article.

Dear Jess et al.,

Thank you for your timely revisions to the manuscript which now reads very clearly and benefits from the addition of the participant table.

Having read the manuscript in full with revisions, if you have the data available, I think section 5 as a whole would benefit from some quotes from participants to illustrate the points that you make. Including but not limited to page 23 line 23 where you describe the participants “err on the side of caution”, the use of a quotation here would illustrate the point more clearly than a summary in your own words. Similarly page 24 line 19 “many participants said…” could be illustrated using a direct quotation from your data.

Some other minor technical points :
Page 4 Line 11 – perhaps ‘subsequent’ would be preferable to ‘knock-on’ as GC has an international audience
Page 9 Line 5 should now say Table 2
Page 21 Figure 8 caption should now say Table 2

Please consider correcting the following word contractions:
Page 8 Line 17 and Page 24 Line 1 (it’s --> it is)
Page 25 Line 2 (don’t --> do not)
Page 25 Line 3 (haven’t --> have not)

I look forward to receiving the revisions.
Best wishes
Katharine

Dear Jess et al.,
Thank you for your swift revisions to the manuscript. I think this paper will make a great addition to Geoscience Communication, we thank you for submitting it to the journal.
Best wishes
Katharine