Dear authors,

thank you for your efforts to revise the manuscrpt based on the comments made by the two Reviewers. I appreciate the work done and acknowledge the substantial improvement in the revised version, which I am generally happy with.

As you can see in the following statements, the two Reviewers are quite satisfied with the revision, although reservations essentially remain for one of the Reviewers about section 7. I have also made by own opinion regarding this part of the paper.

I feel that this section is not appropriate and should not be stand as it is in such a paper. The main problem is mainly with the second part of the section dealing with trends of cloud cover. These results are referring to a major issue which is under discussion, so dealing with this very important issue should not be made in a section of such a paper, which has as main objective to present a new updated dataset. It should not be underrepresented and must be given full attention and complete analysis. Much more effort and analysis should be performed to fully analyze in detail cloud changes ensuring robust and conclusive results. In contrast, as presented here, the CLARA-2 based results are rather presented as comments on the findings of Norris et al. It is better to perform a separate study, another paper, addressing this issue with the necessary in depth analysis.

On the other hand, the first part of the section can be remained in the paper, but not in a separate section.

In conclusion, please go ahead and remove section 7 of the paper. You should put the results and Figures 15 and 16 into section 5 which deals with the CLARA-2 surface albedo product. When transferring this part, please take care and avoid making speculative statements, just comment on the results presented in the paper and discuss them also making reference, whenever appropriate, to others' findings.

Another minor point from my side is the clarification of what you refer to as "dynamic aerosol". Please clarify what this "dynamic aerosol" refer to and specify to what exactly it differs with respect to CLARA-1.

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Reviewer-1

The paper has substantially improved and now it is clearer where and how
much CLARA-A2 improves over the previous version of the same dataset.
The authors have done a fine job in answering the questions, no doubt.
All other minor comments were also carefully addressed.
As regards my comment on Section 7, I see why the authors want to
maintain the section and the modifications they made to support this
intention. I am not willing to be unreasonably picky, if you pass me
this expression. The paper has merits and thus let's go ahead! Thus,
if the authors are happy with a section like this for the reasons they
write, it's fine with me. So, Section 7 can remain as it is included
now. However, I stand firm on my opinion that such sections are not
quite appropriate for a good scientific paper like this, which should be
a bit less speculative in nature. It is my opinion and thus I do not let
it influence the review process too much. Opinions, in fact, are just
opinions.
In summary, I suggest the paper be published as is.

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Reviewer-2

I have read the revised manuscript and am satisfied with the revisions.
I believe it is suitable for publication.

Dear authors,

thank you for the revised version of the manuscript, I am happy with it. The paper is now accepted for publication in ACP.

Best regards

Dr Nikos Hatzianastassiou
Associate Professor
Laboratory of Meteorology
Department of Physics
University of Ioannina
45110 Ioannina
Greece

Tel: ++30 26510 08539
Fax: ++30 26510 08699