Dear Dr. Pedruzo-Bagazgoitia

I have worked through your and your coauthors’ responses to the reviewers’ concerns and suggestions and I am mostly satisfied with them. You and your coauthors are to be commended for your clear and detailed efforts in this regard. There are however a number of minor issues that still need to be addressed:

(1) Reviewer 2 states that “it would also be nice to discuss briefly why the formation of Sc after sunset is less important. Do all climate models simulate the Sc formation correctly.” You responded with comments regarding the formation process. I do not believe that this is what the reviewer was asking about. It seems to me that the reviewer was looking for a sentence or two describing why Sc formation after sunset is less important than that in the day, i.e., why do we care about Sc during the day and not as much as night. In your manuscript your statement does start out with “The high albedo of low Sc clouds and its …” and this offers clear links to the day. However, Sc do have other impacts at nighttime and it would be useful to include a sentence or two on this aspect of Sc.

(2) Reviewer 2 states that “The land model is not sufficiently justified.” I had the same concern when reading the manuscript. You provide useful details in your response to the reviewer. Please would you include some of these details in the manuscript, as this will help other readers with the same concerns as Reviewer 2 and me.

(3) Similarly to point (2) above, please include some of your explanation to Reviewer 2’s questions about the vegetation parameters and the sensitivity to the choice of the land/vegetation scheme in your manuscript.

(4) The decision that you made regarding keeping the threshold for zi+ and zi- the same as previous studies in order to facilitate comparisons with previous studies should also be included in the manuscript.

(5) Page 16 line 6: the added references of Ghinoma et al and Kazil et al need to be placed within parentheses.

(6) Reviewer 2 states that “Based on Figure 9(a), the daytime inversion layer seems to be thickening not thinning. Please incorporate a sentence or two in the manuscript from your response, as well as the reference to Mellado (2017).

(7) There are still a few grammatical errors within the manuscript, including within the text added in response to the reviewers. Please would you try to eliminate as many of these as possible before resubmitting your manuscript.

As stated above, these suggestions are all minor in nature and I do not think that they will take you long to address. I look forward to accepting your manuscript for publication once these issues are satisfactorily addressed.

Kind regards,
Sue

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Susan C. van den Heever
Professor
Department of Atmospheric Science
Colorado State University
(970) 491-8501
https://vandenheever.atmos.colostate.edu/
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Dear Dr. Pedruzo-Bagazgoitia,

I have accepted your manuscript for publication. Congratulations to you and your co-authors.

Kind regards,
Sue

__________________________________
Professor Susan C. van den Heever
Department of Atmospheric Science
Colorado State University
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