Comment 4 of RC1. It needs some more clarification or to follow some of the reviewer comments also in the new text/document in order to make the results more understandable.

There is an unanswered comment in the discussion.
in the text you write: "Furthermore for the various optical parameters, the reported range of values for the Arabian dust cases fall within the uncertainty of the measurement themselves (including systematic and statistical errors) presenting the best possible option at the moment."

How much are the systematic and statistical errors? So you have calculated the uncertainty of the backscatter and the extinction and their propagation in the LR and you included also the standard errors from the multiple profile statistics ? And in the end they "fall within the uncertainty of the measurement " ?

Some of the new references added in the new text are not in the reference list.
Please update the list accordingly. From the tack changes document in the response it seems that only one new reference has been added.

Title: Have not changed according to the reviewer suggestion, as mentioned in the text.

Thank you for the comments

The interactive comment on my question has been posted after my previous decision for minor revision so most of the aspects are now clarified.

It still needs a check on the references.
e.g. Amiridis et al. (2013) is not mentioned in the list
https://www.atmos-chem-phys.net/13/12089/2013/acp-13-12089-2013.html

Also In the references Engelmann, 2016 appears with some strange characters
At least that is what I see in my pdf version. I think it will be identified when the proof reading is performed from the journal.

I do not have any other comments related with the publication of the document to ACP.

Concerning the uncertainty analysis (just for the record - you don't have to add anything more in the document)

I would not say for any instrument that the systematic uncertainty is 0. The papers mentioned in the comments e.g. Mattis et al., 2009 are fine and contribute towards limiting this error. If you think it is negligible for the particular application, I would state it like this.

As an example, for a simple "user" of this LR for the Arabic peninsula, looking at your very nice table 1, someone could wonder why Mamouri 34 (7) and your work 42 (5) differ.
They do not differ so much, but simply using each of these numbers and a satellite based backscatter you end up in a ~20% different AOD. Using any of these two numbers (papers) leads to a systematic difference for AOD.

What I was talking about was the error that you are mentioning as relative and it is based on your comment "5-10% for the backscatter and 10-20% for the extinction". This is the error of one measurement and the propagation to the LR gives a 12-22% LR uncertainty.
In addition to this, there is the variability of the LR at the area due to various reasons (e.g. exact source, mixing, humidity (?)). Which could be described as the standard deviation or the standard error of an ideal instrument (0 uncertainty) measuring for a year in UAE. In an uncertainty budget estimation these two are separately quantified.

congratulation for the interesting work and the effrord to conduct these long term measurements.

SK