Dear authors,

your manuscript will soon be ready for publication in AMT after some technical corrections and the copy-editing process which should fix the remaining language issues. I thank you and the referees for your patience with a long but thorough review process. It was certainly worth the effort as - in my opinion - the manuscript has improved greatly since the first submission.

I would ask you to implement the following technical corrections which should not take long:

- p. 3, l. 1: please add three words to get the correct definition of XCO2: "... of column-averaged carbon dioxide dry-air mole fraction (XCO2) ...".

- p. 3, l. 18: "aerosol loading" not "aerosol lodgings", I guess.

- Comment by referee #1: "Page 5 Table 1 – Maybe mention the TCCON instrument Leicester have
set up at Jinja Uganda (though it will be too late for this paper)."

Your response: "Thank you for suggesting the newly established TCCON site in Uganda. This site
will be a promising data source for future studies. We indicated the presence of this site in the
introduction section of the revised manuscript as potential site that can provide data to bridge
existing data gaps in the future."

In fact, I could not find this reference in the introduction. However, you should also not put it there anyway. I am not aware of an existing TCCON instrument in Uganda. So far, U Leicester has not approached the TCCON community about a site in this region. As TCCON Deputy Chair for Africa & Europe, I am not aware of the status of this site. It would be premature to mention it under these circumstances, so better leave it out.

- p. 7, l. 23: should be "Democratic Republic of Congo" instead of "Democratic republic of Congo".

- p. 15, l. 8-10: the description of the seasons is still confusing. Maybe just define the months and attribute northern/southern season in the next sentence. For example: "The four seasons considered here are December/January/February (DJF), March/April/May (MAM), June/July/August (JJA), and September/October/November (SON). DJF corresponds to northern winter/southern summer, MAM to northern spring/southern autumn, JJA to northern summer/southern winter, and SON to northern autumn/southern spring, respectively."

Instead of the second sentence, you could also indicate summer/winter/spring/autumn etc. in an additional column in Table 5.

- p. 15, l. 13: "maxima are found ..." (not "is").

- p. 24, l. 3-4: Please clean up this sentence, it has several missing words:

- "burning of ???" -> what is burning?
- "??? further intensified" -> "be further intensified"?
- "may not sufficiently estimated"? Sorry, something missing here.

- Table 1: "country" should be upper case. Also: Ascension Island is not part of the UK itself but belongs to the UK oversea territory "St. Helena, Ascension & Tristan da Cunha".

- all references lack DOIs. Please add them! The copy editor will ask you to do this anyway.

- Reference Feist et al.: please note that it was referee #1 and not me who asked for adding this reference of which I am the main author. But since you did add it, please make sure to also include the dataset DOI which is important for TCCON's data use tracking. The correct citaton format for AMT should be "Feist, D. G., Arnold, S. G., John, N., and Geibel, M. C.: TCCON data from Ascension Island (SH), Release GGG2014R0. TCCON data archive, hosted by CaltechDATA, https://doi.org/10.14291/tccon.ggg2014.ascension01.R0/1149285, 2014."

Kind regards

Dietrich Feist
AMT Associate Editor