Dear authors,

I am pleased to inform you that your paper is ready for publication in ACP after some technical corrections:

- p2, l100: The sentence " CALIOP also distinguishes between synoptic and wave ice" appears twice. Thus, one of the sentences is obsolete.

- p2, l167: It should be added that the geometric standard deviation "sigma" gives the width of the distribution.

- p3, l177: Although N and sigma have been introduced I would suggest to write: "With fixed number density N and standard deviation/width of log-normal distribution sigma=1.6.........".

- p3, l180: "Values........values" . This repetition in one sentence should be avoided. Please rephrase.

- p7, l392ff: The discussion on FIg.6 is not clear. What trajectories are shown here? Where and when are these initialized? In the text it is stated that they were initialized at the same time, but how can they then derive different maxima in the backscatter? Are these ones initialized at different locations? Definitely, some more details should be given here. Further, the discussion is quite confusing since in the figures two maxima per trajectory are found and marked (or do I misunderstood this).

- Fig 6, figure titles: Does the date in the title give the date when the trajectory is initialized or the date when the maximum in the backscatter is found?

- Fig 6 in general is quite overloaded with information and it would be worth to reduce or somewhat split up the information given in this figure.

Best wishes, Farahnaz Khosrawi