All three referees were positive about the first version of the paper and recommend minor revisions to address their detailed comments. It seems to me that you have responded carefully to their comments and therefore I am pleased to accept the paper for publication in ACP.

In looking at the latest version of the paper I noted the minor points below myself. Please considering addressing those as technical corrections before you provide a final version of the paper for publication.

p2 l8: I’m of course pleased that you have cited my critical layer article here (2003 rather than 2015 to be consistent with the reference list) but there are plenty of other perhaps more obvious papers that you could have cited — e.g. Homeyer and Bowman (2013 JAS) or many of the papers cited in that, or Abatzoglou and Magnusdottir (2007 GRL) or papers cited in that.

p2 l9: ‘RWB is the large scale meridional overturning of
air masses in the upper troposphere, caused by mechanical shear induced by the mid latitude eddy driven jet (EDJ).’

You have responded to Referee 2’s comment but I recommend that ‘meridional overturning’ needs further clarification (in case it is interpreted as overturning in the height-latitude plane) e.g. ‘large-scale meridional overturning (in a quasi-horizontal plane) of air masses’ . Also ‘mechanical’ seems unnecessary.

p10 l9: ‘The mechanism primarily dictating the direction of RWB is the meridional hear of the zonal wind, which is imparted on the
background atmospheric flow by the EDJ.’ — ‘hear’ should be ‘shear’! ‘which is imparted on the background atmospheric flow by the EDJ’ seems odd to me — the shear is an intrinsic part of the EDJ rather than being caused by it. (Does the shear cause the EDJ or the EDJ cause the shear - neither makes much sense.) Why not simply say ‘is the meridional shear of the zonal wind determined by the relative position of the EDJ’.