Dear authors,

Thank you for submitting your Response to Reviewers and revised manuscript. I have read through them both, and had a follow-up discussion with one of the initial reviewers.

I feel you’ve done a thorough job addressing the comments in the text of the revised paper. However there’s one suggestion that I and the reviewer would like to see included in the manuscript. This is the point about adding an illustration showing the MSFRSR-AERONET AOD differences as a function of air mass factor. You note in your text and response that we wouldn’t expect the results of this comparison to comply with the U95 criterion (95% within ±0.005 + 0.010/m) for good physical reasons, and that’s valid. But we feel that it is worth showing this type of figure in the manuscript anyway, in addition to the expanded text. It will provide a clearer view of some aspects of the data than the scatter plot in Figure 4 alone can, and highlight the differences between the calibration techniques.

We are envisioning something along the lines where the x axis is the air mass, and the y axis is the AOD difference, with the U95 criteria of 0.005+0.01/m and -0.005-0.01/m overplotted. Since there are a lot of points it might be easiest to show binned data (e.g. a box-whiskers type of plot where the whiskers represent the 95% range of differences in the actual data).

I hope that you will be willing to consider this addition (with a few sentences of explanatory text). The reviewer and I feel it should strengthen the paper and should not be too much additional effort to generate from the data you have. It is not a problem that the U95 criterion may not be satisfied as the air mass dependence of the results should shed light onto the MFRSR (and possibly Sun photometer) calibration.

Best wishes,

Andrew

Dear authors,

Thank you for submitting your revised manuscript. Following this revision, with the added Appendix C showing air-mass dependence, I am pleased to submit this version for publication in AMT.

Best wishes,

Andrew