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, have definitely seen instances of very high dewpoint air behind summertime plains cool fronts converging into the South Platte Basin. While most of your arguments still hold for the PMP storms, I do feel there may be scenarios under which leeside depletions would be little to none -- slightly lower dewpoint air, perhaps, but with no orographic subsidence. You may address this in some of your calculations and assumptions, but I'm uncertain. 4) Limiting the storms you consider to only Colorado storms has obvious benefits (the question of transposition becomes more manageable) but also introduces some uncertainty (sample size too low and other very large storms from places like Montana that may, in fact, be relevant, are not included). I have struggled with this a lot. Had there been fewer Colorado storms to consider, then you almost certainly would have chosen to look further, but because there have been some very impressive storms very near Cherry Creek you did not feel the need to look elsewhere. Would it make any difference to your outcome had you considered some of the largest storms from eastern Montana or New Mexico? I do agree that there would be no reason to transpose storms from areas east of Colorado or use their areal reduction characteristics for application over Cherry Creek. (P .S. The analysis of areal reduction of Colorado storms versus the larger sample used for HMR 52 was an excellent contribution. I STRONGLY RECOMMEND THAT YOU SUBMIT THAT ANALYSIS FOR PUBLICATION IN THE HYDROMETEOROLOGICAL SCIENTIFIC LITERATURE) 5) That being said, I have questions about your spatial analysis of precipitation you showed for two storms that I am most familiar with. This could have some bearing (probably small) on the results in number 4 above. For both the Fort Collins and the Pawnee Creek storms, the isohyetal patterns that you show differ in several ways from the maps that we drew. These differences were not explained in your report but were quite noticeable. I assume that your maps were drawn using actual observed data points and then applying the GIS objective analysis tools to get spatial patterns. Our maps for those two storms also included radar data to help interpolate over areas where data were not available or in doubt. In both cases, the rainfall patterns you showed likely would have yielded less precipitation than what our analyses indicated, at least near the storm centers. We strongly believed that the radar data in combination with the point measurements provided the best final product. This then raises the question for the other storms. Did you reanalyze all previous storms with your software or did you utilize the previously completed isohyetal patterns from previous analyses? This is important to know. 6) Since this is a foundational piece of research and storm documentation, it is imperative that all sources of information that you relied upon for determining spatial and temporal patterns of rainfall from past extreme Colorado storms be extremely well documented. Please specify clearly in your report exactly where you obtained this