Dear authors,

please find enclosed two referee reports on the revised version of your manuscript. While one referee is satisfied with the answers and the revision you made, the second raised several additional issues.

I generally, agree with referee 1 that the paper is almost fine for publication, but I also agree with referee 2 on the points that you did not answer satisfying to some of the criticism and suggestions for improvement raised. I also would appreciate if more information for the reader is given as suggested by referee 2.

Therefore, I would like to ask you to do another revision.

Best regards. Farahnaz Khosrawi

Dear authors,

I am pleased to inform you that your manuscript is accepted for publication in ACP after consideration of the technical corrections given below.

Best regards, Farahnaz Khosrawi

Technical corrections:
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- Title: I would suggest to write "Microwave Limb Sounder (MLS)" instead of just "MLS"

- General comment on the manuscript. On several occasion you say the numbers are arbitrarily chosen. This needs more motivation why the given numbers have been chosen. I guess these are numbers you expect to be correct or suitable for your analyses. So that should be clearly stated and it also should be mentioned how did you derive these or how you can assume that this values could be representative.

- P1, L9: that -> than

- P1, L11: "these are in roughly the ratios to CO........" this sentence makes no sense, please rephrase/correct.

- P1, L19: Full stop before reference of Williams and Abatzoglou obsolete.

- P3, L28:Parentheses around Fromm et al. obsolete (should be around the given year).

- P3, L69: closing parentheses obsolete.

- P8, L128: table 1 -> Table 1

- P12, Table 3 caption: error -> either use plural, thus "errors" or write "the error".

- P13, L197: The relationships with CO of CH3CN.........? What do you exactly mean? The relationships "of" CO "to/with" CH3CN? Please check and correct.

- P13, L227ff: I don't like the term "launched" for trajectories. I would prefer "started".

- P15, Figure 11 caption: at altitude 12 km -> either write "at an altitude of 12 km" or just "12 km"

- P16, L264-265: remove parentheses around the sentence.

- P17, L293: Add a reference?

- P18, L315: There is only a year given, but no author name or other source.

- P18, L320: the areas burned -> the areas that burned?

-P19, 343: Change brackets to parentheses and move the references after "Simulations" at the end of the sentence.

-P20, L363: Better to write "number" instead of "figure" (even if then appears twice in the sentence)?

- P20; last sentence of the conclusion: What about the IPCC report or other climate change studies? If the extreme weather conditions will occur more frequently one also could expect forest fires to occur more frequently.