Dear authors,

I would like to thank you for incorporating the relevant literature about the link between PW and precipitation in your manuscript. Although some of the reviewers raised some skepticism about the "show and tell" climatological approach of the severe September 2013 Colorado flooding event, I think that the manuscript deserves publication in AMT (and this Special Issue), taking into account the following, rather technical corrections:
* lines 188-196: please mention here that the IGS data are in particular used in section 3.
* lines 202-210: please refer explicitly to the section 4 when you describe the gridding and kriging method. As you are also using SuomiNet stations in section 3 (Fig. 1), a reader might be confused about the use of this technique in section 3.
* lines 297-298: "the decrease of PW after it peaks". This is a trivial statement. Please reformulate.
* lines 299-302: two consecutive sentences start with a very similar formulation: a ... point to take note of is that ... Please rewrite one sentence.
* line 317: figure 4 shows the time period 6-20 September 2013, and not 1-28 September 2013.
* line 322: I would also switch GPS and radiosonde here to be fully consistent with the order used in line 323.
* lines 330-332: please specify which data (instruments) have been used in the McKee and Doesken (1997) study for the PW measurements in the late 1800s.
* lines 395-397: the five times surrounding the event, based on their proximity to rapid PW fluctuations (in Fig. 3) that have been used in Fig. 8, should be marked by vertical dashed lines in Fig. 3. This will enable the reader to check your selection of times and will guide the reader better through the discussion of figure 8.
* line 466: examined instead of rxamined.
* line 468: should it not be "were" instead of "was"?
* lines 548-550: technically speaking, you only had one anonymous reviewer and David Adams as reviewer (see the discussion forum). The first round of review was just a quick report, to help me in the decision if the manuscript was within the scope of Atmospheric Measurement Techniques and if it had enough basic scientific quality to be published on the online discussion forum. One anonymous reviewer made a full report in this quick report phase already, and was supposed to act as a reviewer again in the discussion phase (I explicitly asked him to publish his full report on the discussion forum, but I never got an answer). So the reader will not have any trace of this report (which he should have following the AMT policy) and might be a little bit confused. But, this is just for information, you can leave the statement if you want.
* table 1: it would be helpful to also put the rainfall in mm in this table, since you mention both the mm and inches in the text. In the text (e.g. abstract) you spoke about 9 deaths of the Colorado September 2013 event, while 8 deaths are wrote down in the table. Please be consistent.
* table 2: please be consistent in the rounding of the lat, lon and alt of the stations. Do you really need 6 decimals after the comma?
* figure 3: the inserted graph does not refer to the 9-14 September period (caption), but the 9-11 September period. From a scientifically point of view, the inserted graph should emphasize on the 9-14 September period.. Please also mark the dates/times of the 5 epochs used in Fig 8 by vertical dasked lines and refer to figure 8 for these in the figure 3 caption.
* figure 8: please provide a high-resolution color plot and increase the letter size of the scales, legends and titles. These are very hard to read. Please mention in the caption that the dot shows the Boulder location and refer to Fig. 3 for the selection of the different times surrounding the 2013 event.