Dear Christos,

apart from some minor and rather technical corrections the paper can proceed to be published in ACP.

I suggest following changes (note, that line numbers refer to the manuscript with track changes):

p. 5, l. 164ff: "As to the role played by other sources of natural variability e.g. QBO, solar cycle etc., which were not removed from the time series in the correlations, it is small and does not exceed 2-4% of the explained variance as seen in a separate analysis (not shown here).” I do not understand this, the correlations are mainly determined by the collinearity of the variability in the compared timeseries. In other words, if there was no short-term variability (and after removing a fitted polynomial) correlations would be rather low. I suggest to remove this sentence.

p. 12, l. 439. Remove "Moving"

Figure 3: Add as a vertical line the latitudes of the stations presented in each panel.

Best wishes,
Mark