Dear Authors, I have read the revised version of your manuscript and your rebuttal. Overall, the rebuttal and revision are convincing. However, while reading the revised version I noticed that some editing may be needed (I guess this will be done by the type setter, so I have not marked these, except for a few below. However, I noticed that while you replace Figure 9 with an update, your description in Sect. 5 still refers to the old figure. Please I have listed these occurrences below, may be you could check whether there are more and fix them.

Sect. 5, 407-413: “Fig 9 shows …. , along with the error statistics and error envelopes … Figure 9a shows that the MODIS DT product correlates well with AERONET data with 60.5% of collocations falling within the global expected error (EE).” However, the new Fig. 9 does not show EE and error statistics.
418 and 439: Fig 9 c ? There is no Figure 9c in the revised version
441: “where other aerosol types can occur “ I assume that here the DT models are used, but it should be mentioned.
478: “The 5 days identified” change to “The 5 days that were identified “
480: “we expect cloud effects in the MODIS product” insert “that” after expect

A practical question: The research algorithm has great value to the community, are there plans to implement these modifications somehow in the operational algorithm, may be for the study region used in this work and for the winter season? Or are the results available as a research product?