Reply to comment by Lu et al. on “An efficient and stable hydrodynamic model with novel source term discretization schemes for overland flow and flood simulations”

This document addresses the comments raised by Lu et al. (2017). Lu et al. (2017) proposed an alternative numerical treatment for implementing the fully implicit friction discretization in Xia et al. (2017). The method by Lu et al. (2017) is also effective, but not necessarily easier to implement or more efficient. The numerical wiggles observed by Lu et al. (2017) do not affect the overall solution accuracy of the surface reconstruction method (SRM). SRM introduces an antidiffusion effect, which may also lead to more accurate numerical predictions than hydrostatic reconstruction (HR) but may be the cause of the numerical wiggles. As suggested by Lu et al. (2017), HR may perform equally well if fine enough grids are used, which has been investigated and recognized in the literature. However, the use of refined meshes in simulations will inevitably increase computational cost and the grid sizes as suggested are too small for real-world applications.