Dear authors,

Thank you for your revised submission. I received one review of it from one of the initial reviewers, who had previously had several criticisms including the formulation in terms of optical thickness as opposed to effective radius.

That reviewer feels, and I agree, that the manuscript will be suitable for publication in AMT after some additional minor revisions. These reviewer comments are as follows:

"The authors properly addressed my main concerns. The paper should be accepted after minor revisions. The new error parameterization as a function of effective radius (re) has the advantage of being fully consistent in a (pseudo) adiabatic framework. Although I would have preferred it if the authors had removed the optical depth parameterization, they clearly explain that the re parameterization is more practical, and physical.
1) The new uncertainty discussion is also very informative. I am wondering if the use of a constant cw=1.81*10-6 is an additional source of error (keep in mind that in the extra-tropics and for supercooled clouds, cw should be smaller than 1.81*10-6).
2) Similarly, the fact that the simulations utilize a constant cloud thickness = 1km is inadvertently shaping the vertical profile of re and extinction. Let’s say that a typical cloud thickness for stratocumulus clouds is 400 m, this implies that the cloud top re is smaller than that for a 1000 thickness clouds for the same Nd (i.e., the cloud base/top gradient in r_e would decrease, which could have implications for the photon penetration). I understand that some simplifications need to be made, but I am wondering if something can be said about the dependence of the calculations on the physical thickness.
3) Figure 6: do the figures show the standard deviation of the bias relative to the mean bias? (the caption is a little bit difficult to understand). If so, it would be more informative to express the bias variability relative to the Nd variability, i.e. STD(Ndtrue-Ndretrieved)/STD(Ndtrue).
4) I agree with the authors that the correction could be applied to spatially homogeneous clouds. Consistent with Figure 9, Painemal&Minnis&Sun-Mack (2013, ACP) show that for homogeneous scenes and independent of their total liquid water path (estimated using a microwave satellite sensor), 3.7um re > 2.1 um re. This also suggests that entrainment and precipitation have a secondary role in explaining differences between 3.7 and 2.1um re (at least for stratocumulus clouds).
5) Abstract: I do not think VOCALS should be mentioned in the abstract (VOCALS data are not used in the article). Moreover, the correction technique is not limited to the VOCALS domain."

I appreciate the effort you put in to address the reviewers' comments in this version. Please let me know if you have any questions.

Best wishes,

Andrew

Dear authors,

Thank you for submitting your second revision. After reading it through, together with the reviewer comments and your responses and modifications based on them, I am happy to accept your paper for publication in AMT.

Best wishes,

Andrew