Knez et al. provide a valuable assessment of the airborne performance of a new N2O analyzer. The performance of the MIRO MGA3, measuring N2O, CO, CH4, and H2O, is characterized during two flight campaigns. Given the sampling locations in humid environments, the authors examine the role of water vapor on the reported N2O values and evaluate different correction strategies. The manuscript is well-written and likely to be of interest to the greenhouse gas measurement community. I have a few comments that I believe should be addressed prior to publication.  

1. Are the water vapor corrections provided in this work applicable to other versions of the same instrument? Put another way, are the authors indicating that the type of characterization they perform in this work should be followed for each individual instrument? They cite previous literature (~line 249) that points to instrument-specific water vapor corrections, so I was left wondering whether this still holds for these new instruments. The discussion around line 410 related to observed differences in the MGA3 and DACOM readings, potentially related to an updated pressure regulator, makes me think this is the case. If so, this point should be highlighted in the conclusion.  
2. Figure 6. Is the difference (Delta N2O) repeatable with respect to H2O mole fraction? What if you put all the data on the same scatter plot? Is it consistent from flight to flight? If it is, that would be interesting.
3. Section 4.1 The Allan precision analysis is based on laboratory measurement. Could you also assess the instrument's performance while airborne, as shown in Figure 9?
4. Section 4.3 Dependency on roll and pitch angle. Is there a quantitative analysis that could be done to compare instrument performance under stable flight conditions versus high-pitch or high-roll conditions? Perhaps even just comparing standard deviations during these different types of motion by the aircraft?
5. Figure 10d. There are some relatively large discrepancies between the MGA3 and DACOM readings during this flight segment after 06:00. Is there a suspected cause of these?
6. Line 576: “In an already conducted study by Waldmann et al. (2026) at the GHGMon campaign 2023 in the Netherlands, our MGA3 was used for a N2O eddy covariance study, calculating N2O fluxes. For a comparison, we applied the same method for specific, representative flux legs across one research flight, once with the v1-β-off water correction and once with the v2 correction. In the comparison, we could find that the relative difference between the results was around 3% which is an order of magnitude smaller than the typical relative flux errors reported by Waldmann et al. (2026). Hence, for this instrument setup, we cannot find any significant difference in the influence of the water vapor correction approaches on the calculated eddy covariance fluxes.” Is this statement supported by any figures in this paper? I think this might be missing a reference to ‘Appendix B.’

This paper describes a quite comprehensive assessment of the performance of a new laser-based system for airborne measurements of N2O. The paper is well-written, and fits well within the scope of AMT. However, a few issues listed below should be addressed before the paper can be recommended for publication.

General comments:

I suggest early in the description of the wet-dry correction problem to cite the early papers on the approach of using simultaneously measured water vapor and long-lived gases for accurate correction of wet to dry air mole fractions (Chen et al., 2010; Rella et al., 2013):

Chen, H., Winderlich, J., Gerbig, C., Hoefer, A., Rella, C. W., Crosson, E. R., Van Pelt, A. D., Steinbach, J., Kolle, O., Beck, V., Daube, B. C., Gottlieb, E. W., Chow, V. Y., Santoni, G. W., and Wofsy, S. C.: High-accuracy continuous airborne measurements of greenhouse gases (CO2 and CH4) using the cavity ring-down spectroscopy (CRDS) technique, Atmos. Meas. Tech., 3, 375–386, doi:10.5194/amt-3-375-2010, 2010.

Rella, C. W., Chen, H., Andrews, A. E., Filges, A., Gerbig, C., Hatakka, J., Karion, A., Miles, N. L., Richardson, S. J., Steinbacher, M., Sweeney, C., Wastine, B., and Zellweger, C.: High accuracy measurements of dry mole fractions of carbon dioxide and methane in humid air, Atmos. Meas. Tech., 6, 837–860, doi:10.5194/amt-6-837-2013, 2013.

It might be easier for the reader if the setup of the experiments (section 3.1) are presented first, and then the different approaches (lines 250 – 280).

On the calibration of the H2O measurements: I was a bit confused about the term “one-point calibration”, and then see that dry air cylinders where used for this. I would not consider this a calibration, but rather a zero measurement. A one-point calibration would be providing a known amount of water vapor with (single) value to the instrument to determine the sensitivity. In addition, the influence of self-broadening of H2O on the linearity of the H2O Measurement should be discussed (see e.g. Chen et al., 2010, Rella et al, 2013).

Given the overall length of the manuscript, I suggest removing the section from Line 550 to Line 575 on interpretation of N2O measurements in the context of simultaneous NH3 measurements. This would be better included in the mentioned upcoming study on source attribution.

Specific comments

L28: “agricultural sector which is, in particular, relevant” > “agricultural sector, which is particularly relevant”

L184: This is a bit unclear. If the calibration gases are dry and should not contain any water, why is there a non-zero “known actual value”, and were does this come from?

L191: add a comma after “calibration cycles”, unless you meant to say that you excluded values less than 1 ppb

Eq. 3-6: it would be helpful to use different symbols for N2O mole fraction and water vapor

L236 “an already” -> “and already”

Eq. 7: please clarify if C_H2O is the dry or wet air mole fraction for water vapor.

L 286: “is provided only” may be change to “is provided with only”, not clear otherwise

L342: note the same equation was also used earlier in Chen et al., 2010. I suggest citing this (as well or instead).

L359-360: is it the mean of all curves, the curve using the mean of the coefficients, or the result of a fit to all data? The mean of the many curves would behave quite different given the different ranges of H2O in each curve.

L366: “correlation … diverge” please reformulate. The values diverge, correlation is not discussed for each line.

L369: “unless … not” I guess you need to remove the “not”

L380: “to assure, that all” remove “,”

L401: is the precision error aggregated to the 0.01% H2O bins? This should be done, given there are many independent measurements at 5Hz within each of the bins.

L402: “and the uncertainty of our own cylinders” why is this needed, given they were cross-calibrated against the cylinders of DACOM?

L404-419: is the uncertainty meant as a one-sigma or two-sigma uncertainty? This is important when interpreting the significance of the differences.

L413: “water dependencies found in the pressure regulator” can you elaborate on this? Does it mean the pressure depends on the amount of water vapor?

L420-424: Does any of the three options mentioned potentially indicate that the uncertainty estimate is wrong for one or both instruments?

L425: Was a cross-correlation performed to check for misalignment in sample time, to rule out errors due to different airmasses being sampled?

L441: “lowest determined in-flight precision” does this mean the worst or the best precision?

L506: Is it possible that the vibrations or accelerations on the Cessna compared to the much heavier DC8 are causing the larger variability, rather than the lack of cabin pressure control? This should at least be discussed in this context.

Caption Fig 10: „The change in water vapor mole fraction while entering does not show any effect on the water vapor corrected v1-β-off-DLH data“ This statement should be formulated somewhat weaker. This cannot be concluded from ambient air measurements as it cannot be ruled out that compensating effects occur.

Eq. A1: there is something wrong here: the right side has indices i,j while the left side does not. So what is α? Note in Gordon et al. (2022) the left side does have the indices.