Dear Thomas,

I have finally made it through the revised paper and the detailed response. Both anonymous reviewers favor the publication with modifications. I found you addressed these well in the revised manuscript. I also read through your email exchange with the CU Boulder group and I found your additions to the manuscript are as far as you can go without becoming too speculative.

Overall, the manuscript is long but relatively easy to read. I only have a number of technical issues I think you should address before it is published:

In Table 9 you use “?” in two cells in the LIDAR ratio row. I don’t think it will be clear to a reader what this means. If the calculations were not performed, then it is more appropriate to use “n/a” to express that the results are not available. There may be other alternatives, but whatever you use has to be clear to the reader.

Figure 8, x-axis label in left plot: Change “.. signa” to “…signal”.

Fig 13: Can you please check the y-axis label vs caption. The label is “SCD(fit)/SCD(RTM)” while the cation refers to a (d)AMF ratio. Those are not necessarily the same quantity. So which one are you plotting?

In the figure labels you use (d)AMF, (D)AMF, and DAMF, in the text its (d)AMF and dAMF, while equation 3) defines it as dAMF. You may want to go over the text and figures and make sure you use the same name throughout the masnucript.

Figure A1: Units are missing

Line 1987 in revised manuscript: change “surface-near” to “near-surface”

Figures A9, A12, A15a, lower right plots: Should be dAMF as y-axis label


Best,
Jochen