Dear authors,

I am pleased to inform you that your paper is accepted for publication in ACP after consideration of some minor technical corrections.

The line numbers refer to the document where the changes have been highlighted.

- p4, l114: "We composite........" Did you mean "The composite is based on ......"?

- p5, l130: "timeseries" should read "time series"

- p5, l133: better to write ~60 N- 60 S.

- p6, l177; "U" in capital letters should rather be a "u" in small letters?

- p7, l198: "don't" --> "do not".

- p8, l241-242: "months" instead of "mon". The "month" after (+15 months) would then be obsolete.

- p9, l300: references should be given in parentheses and not in squared brackets. The same holds for p10, l333-334, p10, l337 and p11, l340.

- p16, Fig.1 caption, last line: the dot between "February" and "2016" is obsolete.

- p18, Fig.3 caption, line 3: Avoid line break between "3" and "%".

- p19, Fig.4 caption, line 3: write "months" instead of "mon."

- p21, Fig.6 caption, line 1: "time series" instead of "timeseries".

- p21, Fig. 6 caption, next to last line: did you mean " using 10.000 Monte Carlo simulations of the monthly means"? Thus, "a" would be obsolete.

Best regards, Farahnaz Khosrawi