Reply on RC2

Abstract. Floods, droughts and changes in water availability are related to temporal variations in streamflow. Understanding how streamflow responds to variability in climate is an important aspect of regions’ hydrological resilience, particularly under climate change. Streamflow elasticities (ε) (or sensitivities) to climate describe observed percentage changes in river flow conditions per percentage change (or unit change) of a climate driver. Drawing on data from over 8,000 catchments, this study provides a pan-European quantification of elasticities of annual mean and extreme streamflow to annual and seasonal precipitation, and streamflow sensitivities to temperature. Results indicate that elasticities exhibit distinct regional patterns across Europe. As expected, annual mean, maximum, and minimum flows generally increase with higher and decrease with lower annual mean precipitation. A 1 % change in precipitation typically leads to an amplified flow response of >1 % in mean flows (ε~ = 1.2), an even stronger amplification in maximum flows (ε~ = 1.3), and a dampened response of