Dear Dr Deeter and co-authors,

thank your for your revised manuscript. Unfortunately, you have not followed the instructions for the Author comments. They say (see https://www.atmospheric-measurement-techniques.net/for_authors/manuscript_preparation.html ):
"Author's response
The author's response (also final author comment in the public discussion) should be structured in a clear and easy-to-follow sequence: (1) comments from referees/public, (2) author's response, and (3) author's changes in manuscript. Regarding author's changes, a marked-up manuscript version (track changes in Word, latexdiff in LaTeX) converted into a *.pdf including the author's response must be submitted."

I have tried my best to identify from your Responses to the Reviewer comments (online) which changes you have made for what reason to the manuscript. I hope I identified (most of) them correctly, if not, please correct in a respective reply. For your next paper, please follow the instructions carefully.

In the following, you'll find my review of your revised manuscript with respect to the comments of the reviewers.
Reviewer # 1:
Item (1): Although I completely accept that comparison to TCCON data is a work on its own and will be published in a forthcoming paper, I think it would be appropriate to mention the existence of these data, the reasoning why it has not been included here, and the future plan to validate the MOPITT data against those data as well. This could go either into the introduction (which I would prefer) or into Chapter 3 (Validation).

Item (2): I have the strong impression that including (some of) the discussion on the topic of stability of measurements, e.g. your responses to the reviewer's concerns, would considerably strengthen the paper. I understand that you do not want to speculate on the sources of the drifts as long as they have not clearly been indentified, and I accept this decision. However, the discussion of the concerns wrt an ad-hoc long-term-corrections and your justification why to do it would help to convince a potential reader having the same concerns as the reviewer. I would recommend to include parts of your arguments in an appropriate way in the conclusions.

Finally, I have a number of comments on my own:

Abstract: The abstract is too short and does not provide necessary details. At least it should be mentioned against which data sets the validation has been performed, and what the outcome was in numbers. The statement "Validation results illustrate clear improvements with respect to long-term bias drift and geographically variable retrieval bias." is not sufficient and not appropriate for a peer-reviewed journal paper.

Introduction:
The introduction misses to a certain part putting the presented work into a larger context. It is done wrt the previous data versions, i.e. for version 7, of MOPITT. However, I miss to some degree a discussion of available data sets suited for validation, and some reasoning why the validation presented here focusses on the Aircraft in-situ data. At the end of the introduction, a sentence or two should be added about the structure of the paper, i.e. what is dealt with in which chapter.

Fig. 3 and Fig. 7: Please explain the colour code in the figure caption.

Kind regards,
Gabriele Stiller

Dear Dr Deeter and co-authors,

I am pleased to accept your manuscript in the current version for publication in AMT. Congratulations!

Kind regards,
Gabriele Stiller