I would like to commend the authors for their effort to collate this impressively detailed data set. Extending existing open data sets, it is an important further step towards truly large-sample hydrology. As such it will be very useful to many in the community.

The data included in the data set are carefully selected, described with quite some detail and accompanied by abundant and very useful additional information, including soil properties and geology. In an additional effort, the authors also went some lengths to ensure sufficient quality of the data set, with in detail descriptions of the systematic quality checks they did.

I find, in particular, the visualization tool that allows users to quickly extract ample information from the Hydroportail a very useful and welcome addition.

I have only two very minor comments/questions:

(1) It would be helpful for the reader to add a very brief description of how CAMELS-FR complements the recently published EStreams data set (Do Nascimento et al., 2024)

(2) not sure what the different symbol sizes in Figure 5 indicate. Catchment area? Please add this information in the Figure caption

Congratulations and many thanks for this contribution!

Best wishes,

Markus Hrachowitz

Reference:

The submitted manuscript provides a description of catchment attributes and hydrometeorological time series for 654 French catchments. All the data described very clearly, manuscript is well-organized and well-written. The visualization tool is amazing! CAMELS-FR will be a very valuable addition for the community of large sample hydrology. I have just a few editorial suggestions.

Kind regards,

Larisa Tarasova

Editorial comments

Line 45-48: It would be helpful to specify here a possible nature of these outliers (apart from karstic catchments).

Figure 2: This is not critical, but would look nicer if all maps would have the same style in terms of displaying administrative boundaries and areas outside France. Consider homogenizing the panels of this Figure.

Line 162: in some stations

Line 169: lack of artificial reservoirs

Line 170: sufficient streamflow quality

Table 1: explain what SIM2 stands for

Table 2: Which attribute is meant here by “Other”. I did not find a corresponding explanation in Section 6. Please clarify.

Figure 7: Very nice!