Dear Samiro
Many thanks for the revised version of your paper. As you can see in the reviewer reports, reviewer 1 is mainly happy with your revisions and suggests just a few further amendments. However, reviewer 2 makes some important points and I share his concerns. Referring to your results as showing the effect of "Dead Sea drying" is a strong statement and given the caveats mentioned by the reviewer, I also think that you should rephrase your story as suggested at the end of the review. There is merit in your simulations but they may be better seen as an "interesting scenario intercomparison" than as "showing what would happen if ...".
An alternative would be to make your simulations more realistic, but it seems that this would be an enormous effort.
I am looking forward to the newly revised version of your paper.
With best regards,
Heini

Dear Samiro

First my apologies that it took so long with this round of reviews and thanks for uploading your 2nd revised version. As you can see in the short comment from the reviewer, there is still an important open issue. It concerns the framing of your study. As the expert reviewer emphasised in all his/her reviews, your model experiments are too idealized / too far away from the real Dead Sea situation and therefore they should not be termed "drying out of the Dead Sea experiments". I understand this point and agree with the reviewer that further changes are required in the text to properly frame the experiments you present in this paper. The recommendation is that you avoid the term "Dead Sea drying out" entirely. Specifically, I suggest the following changes prior to accepting your paper for publication in ACP:

1) Change the title to emphasise the idealized aspects of your study. One option might be: "An idealized model sensitivity study on Dead Sea desertification with a focus on the impact on ‎‎convection‎"

2) Change key words

3) Change abstract (lines 5, 14 where you mention "drying out of Dead Sea" - reword these sentences and better emphasise the idealized aspect of your sensitivity experiment.

4) Abstract line 21: this last sentence is very vague. It would be good to give here more quantitative information about how much evaporation and precipitation decrease, and air temperature increases (the same again on line 560). If I interpret Fig. 2a correctly, then the effect on precipitation is very weak.

5) Please reconsider / clarify figure captions. For instance, Fig. 2 mentions "areal-daily averaged ... evaporation ..." and Fig. 4 mentions "monthly-daily accumulated areal mean values of evaporation ...". I don't understand "monthly-daily"?? I think that Fig. 2 shows area-averaged daily accumulated values and Fig. 4 shows area-averaged monthly accumulated values. Please clarify.

6) Change conclusions and general wording of simulations: emphasise idealized setup in line 554; and change several statements in lines 558ff. You could maybe refer to the "drying of the Dead Sea" sensitivity experiment in the entire paper as the "bare soil everywhere simulation" or shorter "bare soil simulation" and the control run as the "Dead Sea simulation".

7) line 562: I don't understand how a cooling effect can lead to an increase of temperature?? Please rephrase this sentence.

8) line 621: careful - I am not sure that your study tells much about the effect of "lake level decline". Lake level decline means that there is still water but at a lower level and with reduced surface area. But your idealized experiment is a complete bare soil experiment, which is something else than a decline of the lake level. It could be rewarding to do several intermediate experiments between today's conditions and bare soil only.

With best regards,
Heini

Dear Samiro
Many thanks for implementing these changes, I am now happy to accept your paper for publication in ACP.
Best regards,
Heini