Dear Sung-Kyun, dear Youngmin,

It is my pleasure to accept your manuscript for publication in ACP after a few minor revisions.

Please consider the suggestions below before uploading your final version of the manuscript.

With best regards,
Matthias


minor comments
- make sure to give the unit sr whenever values of the lidar ratio S are presented
- clarify that you refer to the linear particle depolarization ratio where appropriate; particularly in the introduction and the methodology section
- Figures 3e-f and 10a-b present exactly the same thing. The latter is more useful due to the color coding of the height level. I suggest to omit Figure 3e-f and to revise the discussion accordingly.
- I am aware that one reviewer wanted to see frequency distributions of your results. Nevertheless, I think that Figures 7, 9, and 11 could be omitted. They add no extra value to the paper as they are just referred to in the text but not really discussed. In addition, basically the same information is transported in Tables 1-3. These tables could be combined to a single comprehensive table that summarizes all findings. If you decide to omit the figures, please don't forget to also omit the lines referring to these figures.
- lines 275-279: I guess the intention of this paragraph is to discuss the occurrence of situations that are different from pure-dust conditions. Please reformulate if that is the case. Otherwise it is not clear where the chosen ranges of values come from



specific comments
line 50: ...at which these...
line 51: give the height used to separate between high and low altitude levels
line 53: ...within the lower...
line 58: ...for case I...
line 59: ...lower linear particle depolarization rations... The numbers presented in the following sentence could be included in this statement.
line 113: omit last sentence of paragraph, the information has been given before
line 126 and 150: add respectively to end of statement
line 170: is this the proper reference?
line 179: I guess you are referring to another paper of Tesche et al. published that year. Please clarify if you mean: Tesche, M., A. Ansmann, D. Müller, D. Althausen, R. Engelmann, V. Freudenthaler, and S. Groß (2009), Vertically resolved separation of dust and smoke over Cape Verde by using multiwavelength Raman and polarization lidars during Saharan Mineral Dust Experiment, J. Geophys. Res., 114, 2009JD011862.
line 180: there should be earlier papers that describe this fact
line 183: is this the proper reference? it seems unnecessary.
line 199: omit and bandwidth. it's the interference filters that count here
line 205: omit Tesche et al. (2009) and
line 216: do Burton et al. (2013) present observations of Asian dust
line 305: give the dates also in the text
line 460: It is confusing to refer to a figure without discussing it right away. I suggest replacing this sentence with: We also investigated the optical properties of Asian dust with respect to transport time at different height levels.
line 552: add ...downwind of the source regions. to the end of the sentence

Dear Youngmin,

thank you for addressing my previous comments. Please note that the signs of "< 3 km" in line 51 and "> 3 km" in line 53 need to be changed. This can be corrected during typesetting.

With best regards,
Matthias