Dear Dr. Adler,

You and your co-authors have worked hard to address all of the referee’s questions and concerns in great detail. I am generally happy with most of your responses. There are, however, a few minor outstanding concerns that I would like to see addressed before moving forward with a decision to publish this manuscript. These include the following:

1) Referee 2 raised a question about IOP 10 in terms of the differences on this day when compared with others. I understand the authors’ arguments however, it would be useful to state something more specific to this effect including that this day was different and that these interesting differences form the basis of an upcoming manuscript.

2) Referee 2 also asked about why the LCLs were calculated using surface conditions as opposed to using the radiosondes. This is a good question, particularly given that the fact that the radiosondes are released on a frequent basis, a point emphasized by the authors in the introduction as a strength of the field campaign, and as one of the reasons for fact for the extension of the Babic study. Can the authors please (a) include in the manuscript the reason for using the surface-based approach; and (b) comment on how the surface-based calculations of the LCL differ from those obtained using the radiosondes at the times that these are available.

3) Referees 1 and 2 both commented on the quality of the figures. I still have some concerns in this regard. More specifically:

(a) Figure 3 is a beautiful figure and will be most useful to readers interested in this topic. It is clear that the authors have attempted to improve this figure from the first version. However, there are still a number of issues. Firstly, the times on the abscissa have been cut off by virtue of the placement of each of the panels. Secondly, the fonts on both the left and right ordinate axes (labels and titles) are really too small to read. I tested this both with a printout and an on-screen version. Please consider ways in which to improve this. You might, for example, use just one height label on the left, applying it across panels, and one time label at the bottom (or top) and applying it across all columns.
(b) Figure 6 has also been improved. The authors argue against making Save a solid marker, however, I think it would be clearer if it were and I don’t think that it makes a difference to the cloud fields. Furthermore, the lat and lon fonts should be increased, and the times could be slightly larger too. Finally, please make a clear separation between your legend and panels. Alternatively consider using a single, much larger legend for the figure.
(c) Figure 7. None of the referees commented on figure 7, however, the label axes, as well as the legend labels are again too small on this figure. Please enlarge these fonts.

I look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,
Sue van den Heever

Dear Dr. Adler,

Congratulations to you and your co-authors on the publication of your manuscript.

Kind regards,
Sue van den Heever