Dear authors,

Thank you very much for the revisions and for properly responding to the reviewer's concerns.
The reviewers have indicated that they consider the manuscript to be ready for publication and I agree to a large extent. However, I have one important remaining concern, which I would like you to address and which may have quite some impact on the analysis and conclusions.

You are assuming that GeoCarb has a nominal resolution of 3 km x 3 km. However, this does not agree with the original proposal which quoted a spatial resolution of 3 km (north-south) by 6 km (east-west) at the sub-spacecraft point, see e.g. https://eospso.nasa.gov/missions/geostationary-carbon-cycle-observatory-evm-2. According to David Crisp, the resolution will likely be even lower. At the current stage, the baseline assumes a resolution of 3 km x 12 km at sub-spacecraft point, as mentioned e.g. in the upcoming CEOS report "A CONSTELLATION ARCHITECTURE FOR MONITORING CARBON DIOXIDE AND METHANE FROM SPACE".

The publication by Moore III et al. (Frontiers in Env. Science, 2018; https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fenvs.2018.00109/full) also assumes a much lower resolution of roughly 10 km x 10 km and the NASA website https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/geocarb-a-new-view-of-carbon-over-the-americas refers to a resolution of 5 - 10 km.

Please revise the manuscript to be compatible with the original assumption of a 3 km x 6 km resolution, but also mention that the final resolution could be coarser, though this is not finalized yet.

Best wishes
Dominik Brunner

Dear authors,

Thank you for the swift response. I am not yet satisfied. The effective footprint size remains 3 km x 6 km even if there is spatial oversampling, and this will affect e.g. the percentage of cloud-contaminated pixels. Stating a 3 km x 3 km and a corresponding percentage of 73% cloud contaminated pixels in Table 1 is misleading.

Best regards
Dominik Brunner

Dear authors,

Thank you for adding this clarification. I am happy to let you know that I accept the paper as it is now. The study has several nice and interesting aspects, notably the effect of different instruments and observation frequencies on the DOFS. On the other hand, I found the restriction to only one week of data a strong limitation of the study. It would be useful to apply the method to longer time periods in the future and investigate the impact on DOFS for different averaging periods, e.g. individual seasons or entire years.

Best wishes
Dominik Brunner