This is a very interesting work presenting the results of MACC-II and the dust related improvements.

Before published I would like to point out some issues related with figures 8 and 9.
I would like to partly agree with the reviewer comment about the calipso data.
Trying to interpret the figures, for the most of the cases I see the caliop natural extinction to be higher than the lidar's total extinction. (just calculating simply the aod's will show this difference).
Using the Lidar to evaluate he MACC profile is straightforward. Then for the natural component of course the caliop is the only possible "evaluator" but differences in that order compared with the Lidar does not help this evaluation.
Then there is this thick shaded line that is statistical and another (very difficult to draw) line which could represent the uncertainty of the lidar measurements per height.

So such issues have to be included in the discussion of the vertical profiles as measurement uncertainties, statistical averaging and calipso lidar differences, make the evaluation of MACC difficult for the reader.

In addition, these shaded areas have to be mentioned in the captions of figs 8 and 9.
Also there is a mistake in the figure number (all bold Fig. x captions).