Dear Manu, dear Abhay

Many thanks for submitting the revised version of your paper. As you can see from the reviewers' comments, they clearly see an improvement and recommend to accept the paper with minor revisions. One reviewer makes some suggestions for minor changes. In addition, I would like to ask you to consider the following points when preparing the final version of your paper:

- line 76 and throughout the paper: references should be in chronological order, not in alphabetic order!
- line 116: not comma after "et al."
- line 118: it is not clear to me what "vice versa" means in this sentence
- line 121: "during relatively unstable conditions" is very unclear do you mean "during variable conditions", or "during conditions of thermodynamic instability / thunderstorms"?
- line 125: delete "on"
- line 192: "2010-13" is not clear
- line 234: important! "The overlapping dates ... are intuitively avoided by the algorithm" is totally unclear. Please explain how you do the classification. Do you consider the NAO index only for days that are not yet in one of the other classes? It is important that the methodology is clear enough such that someone else could repeat the analysis and obtain the same results!
- line 263: I find this a strange sentence, e.g., in the tropics, the surface pressure does not define the weather (no geostrophic balance). Omit this sentence?
- line 304: when i is the index of the month, then c_mclim should just be c_i, right?
- line 319: "over" what?
- line 393: why "and surfaces"?
- line 400: should read "contribute to"
- line 404: "large-scale energy descend" is totally unclear, please rephrase
- line 407ff: this last sentence is strange: why should there be an "inconsistency"? Why do you mention here the WCBs and not earlier? And I disagree with your statement that the "receiving end ... regulates the distribution of these pollutants" - because if the "emission end" does not steer the pollution to the Arctic, then the "receiving end" has no influence. Please rephrase your thoughts here.
- line 577: use initials instead of first names.

With best regards,
Heini

Dear Manu, dear Abhay

Many thanks for further improving your paper, which I am now very happy to accept for publication in ACP!

Best regards and all the best for your future research,
Heini