Dear Haoran,

Thanks for submitting your manuscript to ACP. I found your work comprehensive and interesting, and I am excited to see that your link remote sensing observations with detailed cloud microphysics.

I am happy with your responses to reviewers in general, but I do share some of reviewers’ concerns. For work that uses comprehensive observations and compares results to published work, it is indeed crucial to make sure that your new findings get to deliver to readers clearly.

Therefore, I am hoping that you can improve the readability of the manuscript by considering the following revisions –

1. It is important to summarize key findings and state the impact of your work in the abstract. The current form does not do the justice in terms of reporting your new results, and I feel it is a missed opportunity. Also, how does your work provide an additional constraint on the retrieval of ice cloud microphysical properties exactly? A more specific statement that provides a bigger picture and highlights the potential scientific impacts is always a good way to end the abstract.

2. While I agree that your introduction provides detailed literature review, it does not outline very clearly about the objectives of the manuscript, and how the objectives help to fill the gaps of current knowledge. I would suggest rewriting Line 4–9 on Page 3 to make this part stronger.

3. I am worried that readers will have a hard time to replicate your results. Could you please provide a flowchart to synthesize the observations and all the methods/techniques (briefly), centered with variables used in your analyses? I think such a flowchart will be very useful for readers.

4. Thank you for including the information on goodness-of-fit, but it would be good to provide uncertainty in coefficients a and b as well.

5. Please briefly describe how you selected your 24 stratiform cases and if possible (and if interesting), how these cases distributed across months/seasons.

Hope it helps. I look forward to your revisions.

Sincerely
Christine