The revised manuscript has improved significantly. Most of the comments by the reviewers have been adequately addressed. However, the summary of previous measurements over the Eastern Pacific ocean is incomplete. There is several recent experimental studies from ship and aircraft, and modeling studies that integrate organic and inorganic iodine sources from the ocean surface, and into the stratosphere. These recent literature should be added, and discussed in context of the results presented here before the manuscript is ready for publication.

Reviewer#1 has suggested to depicted "abiotic sources of HOI and HOBr in Fig 5". The Editor agrees with this suggestion. While the formation of VSLs is the primary focus of this paper, HOI is arguably the largest source of iodine from the ocean (Sherwen et al. 2016). Fig. 5 is missing direct emissions of HOI, and should be revised to reflect the state-of-the-science, rather than the scope of this paper. This will broaden the appeal of the Figure & paper.

Reviewer#2 points out that the authors do not explicitly include tropospheric iodine chemistry in their model. The authors circumvent this by sensitivity studies that vary the lifetime of iodine, which is fine, but no reference is given to support the lifetime. Please provide references in support of the iodine lifetime.

With respect to the discussion of iodine injections to the stratosphere: the contribution of CH3I was recently compared with inorganic iodine injections (Saiz Lopez et al. 2015). Discussion is missing about how the CH3I data presented by the authors compare with these estimates, and in context of the relevance of inorganic iodine sources to the stratosphere.

It is only partially correct that "not much more data exist for the coastal tropical East Pacific". The discussion of the IO data presented in this manuscript should be placed into context of previous IO measurements over the Eastern Pacific ocean (see Sect. 4.1.3 in Volkamer et al., 2015; Wang et al. 2015; Sherwen et al. 2016).

The statement "that for the Peruvian upwelling region... higher iodocarbon sources lead to larger IO abundances" is partially supported by Fig. 8. There is equal evidence to the conrtary in that Figure. The statement that "a considerable part of the atmospheric IO variations [can be explained] with the variability of the oceanic organic sources" does not seem well supported. Which variability in IO are the authors referring to in Fig. 8b? A correlation plot should be added in support of this statement, or the language be modified. In the present form there is equal evidence in Fig. 8b to support that the contribution of combined iodocarbon fluxes to IO can be as low as few %. The manuscript language (abstract, discussion, conclusion) should be adjusted to reflect all data presented in this paper. At present it seems somewhat biased to conditions when the contributions of organic iodine fluxes were significant.

References:

Sherwen et al. Iodine's impact on tropospheric oxidants: a global model study in GEOS-Chem. Atmos. Chem. Phys. Disc., 16, 1161-1186, 2016. doi:10.5194/acp-16-1161-2016

Saiz-Lopez et al. Injection of iodine to the stratosphere, Geophys. Res. Lett., 42 (16), 6852–6859, 2015. doi: 10.1002/2015GL064796.

Volkamer et al. Aircraft measurements of BrO, IO, glyoxal, NO2, H2O, O2-O2 and aerosol extinction profiles in the tropics: Comparison with aircraft-/ship-based in situ and lidar measurements,Atmos. Meas. Tech. 8, 2121-2148, 2015. doi:10.5194/amt-8-2121-2015.

Wang et al. Active and Widespread Halogen Chemistry in the Tropical and Subtropical Free Troposphere, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci., 112 (30), 9281–9286, 2015. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1505142112.