Dear David,

thank you for providing your replies to the reviewers' comments.
Your replies have been adequate and addressed most of the issues raised by the reviewers. I agree that it is unnecessary for you to provide the MODIS data used in this study as they are already available elsewhere. I can also understand your reservations regarding the publication of your retrieval code - particularly as it is still experimental and likely not documented to a degree that would enable its application by untrained users. Instead, you are now providing a description of the retrieval and analysis procedure as supplementary material. This is certainly a good addition and will allow the reader to better follow your work.

I have read your revised manuscript. Your have mentioned yourselves that this is already a long manuscript. I therefore have some comments that I would like you to consider before uploading a final version of your work:
- It is somewhat confusing for the reader to follow when you are shifting focus between different products, i.e. screened and unscreened contrails. For the sake of clarity, I would propose to clearly state in the beginning that your are using Mask B from your earlier work and that contrail detection has been confirmed with the help of aircraft waypoint data. This product provides the highest quality of contrail detection (also in light of the supplementary material) and whatever comes out of it is what is considered a contrail in this work. I would then stick with this product as the focus of your work (there would be no more need to call it screened contrails henceforth) and omit everything that is related to other products, i.e. unscreened contrails. I might have missed something but it doesn't make sense to me to discuss a product that you know to be of inferior quality. I think that the change in air traffic is properly represented in your analysis of the waypoint data in Figs. 2 and 6.
- Please provide a reference to the supplement in your methodology section
- Could you add a short description of the aircraft waypoint data? It is simply a data base of lat, lon, height, speed, etc. for individual aircraft?
- Please provide units for all your plots
- It is not easy to understand what is shown in Figure 2. I understand that it shows the flight routes that were used at several time intervals before the MODIS observations. But what is meant with annual difference? Is Figure 2b simply the difference between the plots in Figure 6?
- As explained in my first comment, I suggest to omit Figure 4 and any text related to unscreened contrails. Unscreened basically means unverified contrails if I am not mistaken.
- Please add a description of the symbols to Figures 8 and 10. Following my earlier comments, data for unscreened contrails should not be show in these figures.
- It is not clear why results from MERRA and ERA-Interim are shown in Figs. 9 and 10. You might want to omit Figure 9 to be more consistent, i.e. only ERA-Interim is shown in Figure 7.

With best regards,
Matthias