Dear Dr Newman

both reviewers have suggested minor changes, which your revised manuscript has addressed satisfactorily. I am happy to accept the paper for publication in ACP subject to a few technical corrections listed below.

Kind regards
Jan Kaiser
Editor Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics

Technical corrections:
l. 24: "yr" should be spelled out "years" or abbreviated as "a" (following international conventions).

Axis labels and figure legends should use the same symbols as the text, e.g. C_obs [or C_obs(CO2)] in Fig. 3; C_xs, C_ff, C_bio etc. in Figs. 4, 5 and 11; C_ff in Fig. 6; C(SAO+season+annual average), C(SAO), C(season) in Fig. 9 etc. "CO2" itself should not be used as an axis label.

The right hand side of Fig. 11 needs a better label (carbon inventory?) and the unit should presumably be Tg a-1.

Fig. 11, caption:
"Annual curves showing the attribution ..." - do you mean "Curves showing annual averages of C_pet, C_ng and C_ff"?

The sentence "The annual trends from the bottom-up CARB inventories are plotted on a scale exactly 100 times that of the trends derived from the CO2 measurement" does not make sense because the units of both quantities do not match. Also, C_pet, C_ng and C_ff do not present trends but static contributions. Perhaps you meant "The bottom-up CARB inventories and the deseasonalized CO2 source contributions have been scaled using a scaling factor of 10 Tg a-1 per ppm so that they overlap in the plot."?

Figs. 12+14: There is no abbreviation for month that is approved for technical and scientific writing. Please spell it out in the y-axis label as "month".