Closure to Estimation of the Water Balance Using Observed Soil Water in the Nebraska Sandhills

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