Dear Author,

Your manuscript #amt-2018-8 has received review comments from the two anonymous referees for which a response along with revised paper has been already submitted. While your response is now being evaluated, I found a number of instances in the revised paper that needs your attention for further improvisation of the paper. You are encouraged to provide a one-to-one response to the following concerns directly to me and incorporate these changes in the next revision of the manuscript.

Your manuscript still requires language editing and sentence restructuring for better readability of the paper. It is highly recommended that the manuscript goes under the eyes of a senior-level researcher and/or co-authors and help the lead author to derive more effective manuscript.

In case of any questions, please get back to me.

Hiren Jethva
Associate Editor, AMT


Abstract:
Line 13: “..infrared radiances”

Introduction:
Be consistent in using AMT reference style.
Section 2. “Datasets”
2.1 Remove “in IMD”
2.4 Description of NOAA satellite data is too short and inadequate. Provide more information on the dataset, the retrieval procedure with appropriate references.
Figure 2. Areas marked with ellipses represent different sub-division scale. Mention it in the caption.

Section 3. Methodology
Line 151-153: Provide appropriate references.
Line 170: g is the gravity constant
Consider sentence restructuring.

Section 4.1 “…Sub Division Scales”
Figure 3 caption: “Comparison of INSAT-3D derived TPW with that from RS network..”

Expand the discussion little more. Describe the overall uncertainty in the TPW retrievals and associated sources of errors.
Figure 4. Instead of denoting each sub-plot with a), b), c)…denote it with the actual month of observations; it increases the readability of the plot.
INSAT-3D TPW is consistently lower for values < 40 mm for which some discussion is needed.

Figure 5. Improve the caption

Section 4.2 “Comparison of INSAT-3D TPW with Actual Rainfall Observations”
Figure 6. Showing the data as “box and whisker” plot would enhance the readability of the plot. The data arranged in Figure 6 is somehow unclear.
What is the area coverage considered for such comparison? Over the entire Indian sub-continent? It must be stated in the text as well as in the figure caption.

Line 265: Remove “during summer monsoon season”
The rainfall-TPW relationship appears to exhibit an exponential behavior, which author completely misses to mention in the discussion. Does any other paper explore such relation or already noted such behavior?
Also, author should mention here that TPW corresponds to the cloud-free observations and rainfall measurements are for cloudy atmosphere.

Section 4.3
Provide latitude & longitude in parenthesis
Line 282: Can author provide the URL link to the satellite images referred here?
Line 284: “Figure 7” (not figure-7)
Line 299: “…compares reasonably well with the GNSS TPW observations”
Indicate dates in this format throughout the manuscsript: Jan 1, 2018
Please explain the sudden dive in TPW from ~50 mm to 20~ over Dibrugarh?

Conclusion:
Line 311-314: Rephrase the sentence something like “In the present study, we have assessed the retrieval performance of INSAT 3D TPW by comparing it with corresponding observations from radiosonde network and NOAA’ GNSS network over the Indian region”

Line 320: “…TPW product in forecasting advancement of monsoon precipitation over the Indian region”

Line 322-324: “INSAT 3D TPW product offers near-real time availability over the Indian region with higher spatial and temporal resolution compared to the other derived from polar orbiting satellites”

Mention here the spatial and temporal resolution of INSAT 3D TPW product.

The writeup for Conclusion seems short. Author needs to discuss the comparison results in little more details.


Acknowledgments:
Authors are grateful to Dr. K. J. Ramesh, the Director General of Meteorology IMD for offering valuable suggestions.

Rephrase the sentence as “We appreciate the work of C. M. Kistawal and P. Thapliyal of applying GSCIS correction at IMDPS for improving sounder retrievals. We thank both them for providing their technical inputs.”

The first author also thanks NOAA for providing satellite data of TPW used in the comparison against that of INSAT 3D sounder.

Dear Author,

Your paper is now accepted. Congratulations!

However, please remove the highlighting color (some text are highlighted in yellow color) from the manuscript and upload the clean version.

Best,

Hiren Jethva
Associate Editor, AMT