Closure to "Estimation of the Water Balance Using Observed

We are thankful to Szilagyi [2010] for providing us an opportunity to discuss the important points of our paper [Sridhar and Hubbard, 2010]. We demonstrated a seasonal water balance assessment using the Modified Thornthwaite-Mather (TM) model in the Nebraska Sandhills. We computed the water budget for a few representative weather monitoring stations located in the Sandhills using the high resolution soil moisture data to assess the storage. In our water balance analysis, soil moisture storage is determined based on observed soil moisture and actual evapotranspiration, ETact was computed for each month using the change in storage in soil water and precipitation. If the change in storage is positive based on our observed soil moisture, we considered two scenarios and the least of the two is considered for computing actual ET. If the change in storage is positive, which is the case in our study area as shown in Figure 3 where soil moisture storage in the root zone is above 100 mm (except May, June and July where it was close to 50 mm), that additional soil water beyond the soil column storage is available for ET. In other words, the study sites were only energy constrained and not soil water constrained. We do not believe that the overall ET in the Sandhills exceeds the precipitation. However, at the four stations examined, mainly valley and we