Dear authors,

although referee 3 acknowledges the effort you put in the revision of your manuscript there are still some issues which should be improved before publication in ACP (see attached referee report).

The detailed suggestions for revisions given in the bullet point list can be realised straight forward. The major general points of criticism and according request for revisions are to my understanding the following three points:
- the inital Cly adjustment
- the HCl discrepancy - if this is seen or not
- model issues at the vortex edge

Which require the following improvements/adjustments:
Year-to-year variability and temporal trend of Cly:
I think here it requires just a bit more clarification what has been done

HCl remains in the core of the polar vortex in austral winter:
This is indeed and important point and in case you do not encounter the problems in simulating the HCl distribution in polar winter as described by Grooss et al. this should be clearly stated. If your model performs better than the other models this would be a quite interesting issue and indeed needs some discussion and clarification why the model performs better than all other models.

Overestimated transport across the vortex edge in models:
Also this should be discussed in the manuscript since this is an important point and adding this to the manuscript would be useful for the readers.

Continuous loss of HCl in the core of the polar vortex:
I think here you need to make the differences between these processes more clear in the manuscript.

Model description:
I agree that providing the reactions and maybe also reaction rates used in the simulation would be quite valuable for the readers and especially the modellers.

Data availability:
Yes, please provide the web pages or contact points for the data sets used in this study.

Best regards, Farahnaz Khosrawi

Dear authors,

I am pleased to inform you that your paper is accepted for publication after considering the technical corrections given below and the ones given by the referee.

Bets regards, Farahnaz Khosrawi

Technical corrections:
P2, L2-4: I would suggest to rewrite these sentences as follows: At 18 km where most ozone was depleted, most ClO was converted to HCl. At 22 km where some O3 was available, additional increase in ClONO2 from pre-winter value can occur, similar to the case in the Arctic.

P6, L29: "tangent point at 20 km altitude and the point at 20 km altitude for....." Is this an accidental doubling of altitude or are you really meaning two altitudes. In case of doubling just delete the obsolete text parts. In case of two altitudes the text needs to be rewritten so that it becomes more clear.

P15, L28: toward poleward -> either write "polewards" or "toward the pole".

P16, L5: formation HCl -> formation of HCl

P18, L10: I would suggest to write either "Additionally, sedimentation of the particles is considered" or " Sedimentation of the particles is also considered".

Fig 4 caption: I would suggest to write "outside the vortex" instead of just "outside"