Dear Diego,

Thank you for your patience regarding the review of your manuscript. I have received a new report from Referee #1. Based on this report and my own reading, I would like to provide some guidance towards concluding the review process of this work.
Nevertheless, I would like you to provide a detailed reply to the Referee's comments.

I understand that this work has been in the making for quite some time and that its current form might be the result of relying to different, maybe even contradictory recommendations from the Referees. While having this in mind I would like to offer some suggestions that might improve the readability of your manuscript. Currently, your text is rather lengthy with plenty of redundant parts. This has a serious impact on the reading experience. I personally have been almost too exhausted after the theory part to make sense of the findings. I found it particularly disappointing that you discuss one of the used products only to then state that you won't consider it for further analysis.
With this in mind I would like to provide the following suggestions (not sorted by priority):
- Introduce all acronyms when first used, don't introduce acronyms or formula signs that will not be used later. Restrict the description of figure panels to the figure captions an omit it from the text. Get rid of repetitive text.
- You are referring to the day-to-day variability so often that I wasn't certain in the end that I understood it correctly. Does it mean that every day is considered independently or that differences between neighbouring days are investigated? Please explain it once in detail and drop it for the rest of the text.
- The end of your introduction is too lengthy. Two sentences are enough to state what's presented in which section.
- Please do not refer to anything that will be addressed later in the manuscript. Either explain it right away, omit the statement, or move the entire discussion.
- Big parts of section 2.4 seem redundant. Please stick to what's needed to understand the presented work.
- Section 3.3 appears to be overly complicated and repetitive. At the same time, it's not clear what's meant with a grid box. Are these for different height layers or total-column grid boxes? The last paragraph of this section is a prime example on how you provide some information and then leave the reader completely puzzled about its meaning by referring to later in the text.
- The concept of sorting according to deciles is not quite clear to me. Please make better use of the figure. Please improve the explanation.
- My biggest concern of your presentation is the lengthy description of the different data sets that ends with not even considering one of them in the analysis. It is very unsatisfying for a reader to try to understand what you have been doing only to learn at the end that it was wasted energy. Nevertheless, this background is important to assess the findings. I would therefore suggest to thoroughly revise this part to only include what will actually be used later with a brief discussion of the reasons for this decision. The complete description of the different data sets and your reasoning for excluding on of them should be moved to the appendix together with the corresponding figures. I am convinced that such a change would improve the focus of your manuscript towards the results.

I do not intend to send this work out for review again and I hope these suggestions will be of help for you revision of the manuscript.

With best regards,
Matthias

Dear Diego,

thank you for providing a thorough revision of your work. The manuscript is now much more focussed with better access to your main message. I am therefore happy to accept it for publication in ACP. However, I would like you to address a few minor items:
- Please use present tense rather than future in the beginning of the manuscript (and elsewhere as long as you are referring to the paper).
- Regarding the Supplement, I am not certain if you should include figures that you are not referring to in the text. Please double-check with Copernicus during copy-editing.
- Please also make sure that the referencing to the figures is correct. For instance, there is no reference to Figure A2. It's probably a wrong reference to Figure A1 in Section A5?
- The final sentence of Section 3.1 seems out of place as your state in the beginning of that section that only night-time data are used.

With best regards,
Matthias