Dear Tommaso F. Villa,

thank you very much for the revised version of your manuscript! We have received a review of this version of the manuscript, albeit only from one of the two reviewers. While the reviewer acknowledges the improvements in the manuscript, he also points out several unresolved issues from the first review. One important aspect is to avoid "overselling" the study and to make too generalised statements about costs / efficiency, and I agree that the manuscript could still be improved in this respect.

The review gives detailed suggestions on the individual points and in my view, it should not be difficult for you to follow these suggestions or in case you do not want to do this for some of them, to explain why you disagree with the reviewer.

Please provide a point by point reply and a manuscript with tracked changes when you submit a revised version.

With best regards,

Andreas Richter

Dear Zoran Ristovski,

thank you very much for your revised manuscript "Characterization of the Particle Emission from Ships Operating at Sea Using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles". I have read it again and think that it is overall close to being acceptable for publication.

I have however to insist that you follow the advice of the reviewer to provide a balanced description of the potential of UAV measurements - your manuscript reports a nice case study, but it does in no way provide the basis for a large scale application under real world shipping conditions. As I'm sure you will agree, problems of weather, logistics, durability of equipment, automatic detection of ship plume position and obtaining sufficiently long measurement times with a UAV fast enough to operate at typical wind speed over oceans are all issues that need to be solved for an operational application. I therefore think that you should at least mention these problems briefly.

I have made some suggestions in the attached file and hope that quickly adapt your text so that I can then accept it for final publication.

Best regards,

Andreas Richter

Dear Zoran Ristovski,

I'm pleased to accept the revised version of your manuscript "Characterization of the Particle Emission from Ships Operating at Sea Using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles" for publication in AMT as is.

Thank you for choosing Atmospheric Measurement Techniques for publishing your results!

With best regards,

Andreas Richter