The Aerosol and Carbon Detection Lidar (ACDL) is the first high spectral resolution lidar using an iodine filter in space. This is an important milestone for aerosol and cloud research from space and thus has the opportunity to advance our understanding of aerosols, clouds and their interaction, once the data will hopefully be made publicly. The manuscript describes the data, retrieval and first results of ACDL with focus on the aerosol (cloud) retrieval (ACDL-A). Thus, the paper is very important with respect to future use of the data, especially if viewed as a piece of documentation of the aerosol retrieval for DQ-1. However, for me to accept the paper, revisions are needed, as too many details of the processing are missing. In the block diagram Fig.6 there are some crucial processing steps like ‘Wavelet domain denoising’ or ‘Multi scale local denoising’ which are not described at all. There is also no description of the depolarization calibration.

Specific comments:

P1, l.16: ‘two wavelength polarization detection’ gives the impression that the depolarization is also detected for the 1064 nm channel. But according to the block diagram this is not the case.

P2, l.39: Please state once for non-lidar specialists what the lidar ratio is.

P2, l.50: It would be good to also include the first papers that proposed the HSRL technique.

P4, Figure 1: Besides the block diagram a table containing basic system parameters (rep. rate, pulse energy, telescope diameter, detector type, sensitivity, …) should be included. Some are mentioned in the text, but it is best to put them together in one place.

P5, l.110: If z is height (altitude), this assumes an exactly nadir pointing lidar. Since this is not the case, there are some terms missing to account for off nadir pointing.

P5, l.115: f_a should not depend on temperature and pressure, only f_m

P5, l.119: Can you give a reference, please?

P6, l.1443: Launch = emission?

P6, l.146: It is not clear, what is meant here. The two pulses are already separated in time.

P7, l.155: ‘The mean signals’ would be better, as a contrast to the ‘minimum values’ for the other channels. And only the mean offset can be estimated and subtracted and not the total ‘noise’ as stated in the text.

P8, l.159: It is not the ‘background noise’ but the ‘background signal’.

P9, Figure 5: Font of scale and axis titles are too small

P10, l.228: Median filters are not linear and do not preserve mean values. How large is the window for this? What is the size of the sliding window

P11, Equ.8: What numerical scheme is used to calculate the derivative? And in calculating the lidar-ratio, what measures are taken that alpha and beta have the same vertical resolution?

p.12, l.249: This paper gives only the basic algorithm. What values for bulk- and sheer viscosity and thermal conductivity and their temperature dependence are used? Please give a reference!

p.13, Figure 8: Fonts are too small.

P14, l281: flied = flew?