Dear Authors,

I am pleased to let you know that I am happy to accept your manuscript subject to some additional very minor revisions, which have been raised by Referee #3 (Sergey Khaykin). Please see below for details and address these comments and submit a revised version of your paper. If you have any questions then don't hesitate to get in touch with me.

Thank you for your submission to ACP.

Kind regards,
Anja Schmidt (as2737@cam.ac.uk)

Additional comments by Referee #3 (Sergey Khaykin):

The authors have addressed the remarks in an appropriate way and the manuscript has been improved. I have a few minor remarks on the revised version though.

p.5 l. 16. The "green" wavelength of SAGE III-ISS should be 521 nm, see https://eosweb.larc.nasa.gov/project/sageiii-iss/guide/DPUG-G3B.PDF

p.13, l.15. The Siberian forest fires are mentioned here in the context of stratospheric aerosol perturbation however the analysis that follows doesn't say anything whether the wildfires actually had any contribution to the observed perturbations. I understand that drawing a definitive conclusion on the potential impact of these wildfires is difficult given the prevalence of volcanic eruptions so perhaps it would be safer to omit the mention of wildfires. Otherwise one should also mention the Alberta wildfires in late Spring, which actually did have a stratospheric impact as suggested by lidar observations in Haute Provence.

Figure 7 provides very useful insight into the meridional dispersion of the plumes. I wonder though why the plots show the extinction instead of backscatter, which is what is measured by CALIOP. I would personally opt for scattering ratio in this figure, which is proportional to aerosol mixing ratio and would therefore reveal much better the high-altitude plumes.

Dear Authors,

thanks for submitting a revised version of your manuscript. I have read through the manuscript once more and added some very minor comments to the attached pdf. Please consider my suggested edits when uploading your final version, which I will happily accept for publication in ACP.

All the best,
Anja Schmidt (as2737@cam.ac.uk)