As a member of the larger research community interested in this topic, I read the manuscript, and decided to post thoughts/questions I had as I read it. I hope these can be useful.

The introduction would benefit from a stronger tie-in to the cloud-aerosol interactions motivating ORACLES, currently it is highly general. Specific motivations include smoke-cloud microphysical interactions; the time evolution in CER towards discriminating the boundary-layer semi-direct effect from the microphysical interactions; the impact of intervening absorbing aerosol on the CER retrievals.

Overall I was surprised to not see more language about overlying smoke in the manuscript and its cases. Did I miss something? Was this not an issue?

More specific comments:

Paragraph spanning lines 56 to 69: why aren’t SSA assumptions of the overlying smoke on the CER retrievals mentioned here? 

In the case of ORACLES the overlying smoke layer was also humid enough to support clouds at times near the top of the aerosol layer. The RSP also provided useful retrievals of these mid-level cloud properties, as shown in Adebiyi et al 2020. This paper would be worth citing, perhaps at the end of line 172 or as an example of CER retrievals helping to determine aerosol-cloud interactions in the ORACLES regime.

Line 141: what is the lower limit of the drop size detected by CAS? Is it also 3 micron? It is also my understanding that the smallest dropsize bin of the PDI was too noisy to use, perhaps because of interference from the airplane’s electrical system. Can the ORACLES PDI PI comment? For the thin, polluted clouds sampled during ORACLES, the lower size limits will be important. How did the Nds compare?

Section 2.4: continue to be puzzled why the SSA of the overlying smoke layer isn’t mentioned as an additional uncertainty within the eMAS retrieval.

Top of p. 10: eMAS issues seem like they belong in data section.

Fig 1 caption: provide total # of flights in each category.

Line 419: in combination, for LWP, the bias is about 10% (Grosvenor et al. 2018).

Figs 7-9: What was the AOD overlying the cloud in both 20 Sept cases? Same question applies to the 14 Sept case later on.

Fig. 10: are the cloud DSDs unimodal throughout the vertical column? Might be good to examine the actual DSDs near cloud top to understand the differences better. Maybe the issue is that the 2DS is having trouble picking up drops near the smaller end of its range, so that the DSD looks more bimodal within the CAS/2DS combined distribution. Is there any evidence of coincidence undercounting by the CAS? It would also be good to show the vertical profiles in LWC, allowing you to add in the bulk King-derived LWC. How thermodynamically well-mixed was the cloud layer?

Table 2: why are the polarimetric optical depths so low?

p. 41: how confident are you in the CO2, CH4, H2O above-cloud optical depths/loadings? If I understand correctly these are coming from a reanalysis - is that MERRA2? You mention doubling the concentrations, these might bring you closer to the actual values. How do the reanalysis H20 values compare to those measured on the aircraft? This error source should be genuinely quantifiable using the ORACLES H2O in-situ dataset in contrast to the statement made on line 909. THis may be addressed in Pistone et al 2024.

p. 44: more effort can and should be made to understand the differences between the two probes. How about picking a long level incloud-leg, ideally near cloud top, and comparing an average of the full DSD. Is there evidence of bimodality? How does Nd compare? What is the flow volume of the 2 probes? Is the sensitivity to the smallest drop sizes the same?

Section 5: why isn’t the aerosol overlying the cloud mentioned for these cases? Could it be neglected? Did you select 2 cases with no overlying AOD? I don’t recall reading that and wonder if I missed it.

Section 6: Stronger guidance should be provided here to help potential users of the publicly-available eMAS cloud property retrievals. Which one would you recommend?

References:

Adebiyi, A. A., P. Zuidema, I. Chang, S. P Burton and B. Cairns, 2020: Mid-level clouds are frequent above the southeast Atlantic stratocumulus clouds. Atmos. Chem. Phys., 20, p. 11025-11043, 10.5194/acp-20-11025-2020

Grosvenor D. P., et al 2018: Remote sensing of droplet number concentration in warm clouds:

A review of the current state of knowledge and perspectives. Rev. in Geophys., 56, p. 409-453, doi:10.1029/2017RG000593

K. Pistone, et al 2024: Vertical structure of a springtime smoky and humid troposphere over the Southeast Atlantic from aircraft and reanalysis. Atmos. Chem. Phys., 24, pp. 7983–8005, doi:10.5194/acp-24-7983-2024