Reply to Comment on ‘The central role of forests in the 2021 European floods’ by Arie Staal and Gerbrand Koren

Abstract

In their comment, Staal and Koren replicate our experiment using a different methodology, namely a Lagrangian moisture tracking method. Their results largely agree with ours, which is therefore a good indication of the high robustness and accuracy of these findings. Although this comparison is of great value, to a large extent their comment is a criticism of our interpretation of the results, with which we disagree. Their main objection refers to the fact that, since they show that the relative contribution of forests to the precipitation recorded during the event was not anomalous (above average), their ‘central role’ would not be justified. However, a relevant or even a dominant contribution does not necessarily have to be anomalous, so that claim does not hold. In other words, forests played a ‘central role’ because their contribution (adding transpiration and interception loss) was greater than 50%, regardless of what their average contribution to precipitation in the first half of July might be.