Dear Authors,

Having conferred with both reviewers of the original manuscript, we feel that the manuscript has greatly improved. The following minor revisions, given below, have come up when reading the revised manuscript. Please address those before we can publish your manuscript.

With kindest regards,

Daniel Knopf

Minor revisions:
How do your findings relate to models with higher spatial resolution? Clearly, running simulations at higher resolution is beyond the scope of this revision but would you expect that observed numerical tendencies also occur at a higher resolution scale?

It is not clear why sublimation as a sink cannot be treated independently from sedimentation. Maybe add a sentence on this matter to make this clearer.

Conclusions: It should be pointed out that sublimation is omitted in the analysis, given that sublimation is a substantial sink of upper tropospheric ice.

Abstract: Are the ICNC in good agreement with satellite observations? Is this statement accurate? Figures 1 and 2 do not corroborate this clearly. Maybe use same colormap for Figs. 1 and 2 to make it easier for the reader to interpret both figures.

End of Section 4: It would be valuable to mention here that the NOfree simulation compares well with observations. That would also give an additional argument for examining NOfree in section 5.

Page 13, line 296: DETR is independent of updrafts? Why, then, is DETR higher over land?

Page 16, line 310-312: It does not look like NCIR is the dominant source of ICs between 350 and 200 hPa. Based on Fig. 6, it seems to dominate only above approximately 200 hPa level.

Page 20, line 397: Did you mean homogeneous freezing level instead of melting level?

Page 20, lines 406-407: Does the ice water content change between FUT and REF simulations?

Page 21, line 434-435: “consists in” reads a bit awkward. Also, please elaborate on the statement “FREE should not depend only on CDNC”. On what does it depend?

Page 21, line 457: Did you refer to the homogeneous “freezing level”?

Page 21, line 458: You can omit “vertical”.

Dear Authors,

I am happy to accept your manuscript as research article in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics.

With kindest regards,

Daniel Knopf

For your information:
I found one small typo in line 411 of revised manuscript: "homogeneous freezing level" instead of "homogeneous nucleation freezing level".