All three referees feel that the paper has been improved significantly in revision. However all still see shortcomings with the paper, particularly referees 2 and 3. My own summary of the referees reports is that, whilst this paper potentially makes a useful contribution in describing STE in the tropics, in its current form it still contains significant material that is imprecise or speculative. I have some sympathy with Referee 3's comment: "My suggestion would be to stick to the facts and measurement and don't stretch beyond what can be fully supported by evidences and when you do so make absolutely clear these are hypothesis and conjectures."

Therefore please can you prepare a revised version of the paper together with a careful response to the referees' comments. I don't view it as essential for you to make changes in response to every comment of the referees, but some significant changes are still needed. I will then consider whether or not I need further input from the referees before making a decision on the paper.

Your revisions have gone some way towards addressing the referees comments. However I do feel that there are still problems with the paper -- as highlighted by my detailed points below. Please can you make further revision in response to these points (particularly those marked *) or provide responses arguing why no change is needed.

If the next stage of revision is satisfactory then I expect to accept the paper for publication in ACP. However I note that the use of English remains poor (I have some sympathy -- but that judgement has also been made by referees whose first language is not English -- and unless this is improved I will asked that the paper is copy-edited by the ACP Editorial Office before it is published.

*l16: ‘0.8-1 km/day, which is thrice than that of non-convective day descending rate.’ — unclear. First ‘thrice than that’ would be much clearer as ‘three times that’. (‘thrice’ is old-fashioned and not in common use.) Second I’m not clear what you mean by ‘non-convective day descending rate’. Do you mean typical descent rate on a non-convective day? Do you mean ‘day-time’ (if so why)? Or what? ‘descending’ should be replace by ‘descent’ in the two occurrences in the sentence as a whole. The text on this topic later in the paper (l215-217) should also be clarified.

*l61: ‘Liang et al. (2009) have described the
time scale of stratospheric ozone intrusion that occurs in 3 steps, and takes about three months to reach from stratosphere to lower troposphere.’ — I suppose that this is a description that starts from a level significantly above the tropopause. It is a little confusing bearing in mind your ‘slow’ vs ’fast’ characterisation later. Surely the processes that you identify as ‘slow’ act on time scales much less than three months? I suggest that you are clearer about what ‘slow’ means. [Note that this was a point highlighted previously by Referee 3 — you say in your reply ‘Thanks for pointing out this aspect and appropriate modifications are done in the revised manuscript’ — but in my view you have not provided the appropriate modification.]

l115: ‘The tropical cyclones are the synoptic-scale disturbances of organised convective systems which weaken the tropopause by overshooting convection.’ — this seems a strange characterisation of tropical cyclones. But perhaps you are simply trying to say that one effect of tropical cyclones is to organise convection?

l369: ‘descend’ > ‘descent’

*l341: ‘Numerical simulation shows the presence of stable dry ozone rich stratospheric air in the upper and middle troposphere over the cyclone prone area.’ — this seems very misleading to me — as far as I can tell you have no numerical model results including ozone — so the ‘ozone-rich’ is a guess (based on the fact that the numerical simulations seem to show air that is ‘meteorologically’ stratospheric. Referee 3 has previously suggested trajectory studies to resolve some of this ambiguity — I accept that carrying out trajectory studies is outside the scope of this paper, but I do strongly recommend some kind of statement at this point of the paper saying something like ‘The descent of stratospheric air has been deduced indirectly here from a combination of ozone observations and meteorological observations and modelling. A natural next step to confirm this descent would be to carry out trajectory (or chemical tracer) studies in the WRF model.’ — This sort of statement would, in my view, add to the the value of your paper rather than diminish it.

l470: ‘planed’ > ‘planned’

l715: ‘Arctic’ > Arctic’

In my previous communication I said:

"Referee 3 has previously suggested trajectory studies to resolve some of this ambiguity — I accept that carrying out trajectory studies is outside the scope of this paper, but I do strongly recommend some kind of statement at this point of the paper saying something like ‘The descent of stratospheric air has been deduced indirectly here from a combination of ozone observations and meteorological observations and modelling. A natural next step to confirm this descent would be to carry out trajectory (or chemical tracer) studies in the WRF model.’ — This sort of statement would, in my view, add to the the value of your paper rather than diminish it."

What you have said is: "The present observations show the influence of the tropical cyclone on the air mass exchange from the stratosphere to the lower troposphere and redistribution of stratospheric ozone. Further trajectory and chemical analysis are required to quantify the amount of mass exchange taking place between the stratosphere and the troposphere."

This is not quite sufficient in my view -- recall that I wish to take account of Referee 3's comments whilst accepting that trajectory calculations are not practical and without consulting Referee 3 again. Referee 3's view, which I share, is that you have not shown conclusively that the high ozone air is of stratospheric origin (e.g. you show low relative humidity, but you don't show water vapour concentrations'). Therefore I request that you make a more cautious statement -- I suggest:

"The present observations provide strong evidence for the influence of the tropical cyclone on the air mass exchange from the stratosphere to the lower troposphere and redistribution of stratospheric ozone. Further trajectory and chemical analysis are required to verify this and to quantify the amount of mass exchange taking place between the stratosphere and the troposphere."

I see one other small error: 'decent' on l15 should be 'descent'

l298: 'vorticity may be also associated with diabatically by condensational heating but the' -- something wrong here -- 'with diabatically by condensational' doesn't make sense. Perhaps you mean 'vorticity may also be associated with diabatic processes associated with condensational heating' or something similar? Please correct.