Dear Kristin Poinar and Lauren Andrews,
Your manuscript received two critical and in depth reviews that both highlighted the novelty, originality, thoroughness and relevance of the research and that confirm that the manuscripts seems in general to be well within the scope of TC. Both reviews were very positive but also indicated a few aspects that should be addressed in a revised version of the manuscript. Overall these points are rather minor and mainly concern the structure, the explanation of some terms and the methods and the related interpretation.
Given the response in the interactive discussion, it seems that the authors will be easily able to address the raised points by the referees and therefore the revised manuscript has a good chance to be accepted. I therefore ask the authors to undertake the planned revisions and submit a revised document together with a point by point response.
I thank the authors for their very considerate and detailed response of how to address the points raised by the referees.

Andreas Vieli, editor
9 Jan 2021

Dear Kristin Poinar and Lauren Andrews,
Your manuscript received two critical and in depth reviews that both highlighted the novelty, originality, thoroughness and relevance of the research and that confirm that the manuscripts seems in general to be well within the scope of TC. Both reviews were very positive but also indicated a few aspects that should be addressed in a revised version of the manuscript. Overall these points are rather minor and mainly concern the structure, the explanation of some terms and the methods and the related interpretation and a better embedding in literature.
In the revised manuscript, you very carefully and satisfactorily addressed all these points and further documented and explained the revisions in the response in detail. Overall is now a rather long paper, and the discussion on future approaches got even slightly longer in the revised version, but given the wealth of different data and wide assessment of different methods this length is justified.
I am therefore very happy to accept this manuscript for publication in TC, provided that some very minor (technical) points listed below get corrected. I congratulate the authors for this very interesting, systematic and relevant data analysis approach on the prediction of lake drainange. At this stage I would also like to thank the authors for their cooperation in and their handling of the reviewing phase.

Andreas Vieli, handling editor, 26 Jan 2021

Very minor corrections/comments:
line 29: Style 'Meltwater is collected in these lakes…'
line 64-69: this is a very long sentence, maybe break up
line 244: '…show UP clearly…'
line 116: here you define the abbreviation TUD for Techn. Univ. Dresden, then in the following you could use this abbreviation TUD instead of writing it all out again to^gether with the TUD (see line 118, 177, 457,…
line 689: something went wrong here: '…data from repeat…'

caption fig 2 line 1: '… on the examples of (a) a fast … and (b) a slow-draining…'