Dear Guy,

Thank you for your thorough response to the equally thorough reviews. Through the interactive dynamics of the problem over regional scales, your paper provides a level of sophistication and detail to the problem of aerosol-cloud interactions in tropical regions that I believe to be a significant advance.

There are of course aspects of the problem that remain to be considered as you acknowledge in the conclusions and in lines 684 to 690. Before accepting the article for publication I would like to see some statement in the abstract to the effect of your concluding statement that "Furthermore, we do not include the temporal evolution of the aerosol concentration. Feedbacks between the aerosol concentration and clouds processes (such as wet scavenging), as well as the direct effects of aerosol on radiation would add another layer of complexity that should be accounted for in future work." It is notable that the strongest impact you find at the TOA is with convective clouds that would presumably be most efficient at reducing aerosol concentrations through rainout.

Regards,

Tim Garrett