Dear Minghui and co-authors,

I'm pleased to inform you hat one referee has accepted your paper as is and the other suggested some minor revisions (see below). Please take into account these suggestions in a next version of the manuscript, then the final decision can be made.

Best wishes, Martina


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I think the authors have done a very good job responding to the reviews. I appreciate that they have averaged the data to be near the same scale now between models and observations, and that truncation has been applied to ice with a size threshold representing the observations. I think this will be publishable with a few further clarifications as noted below.

I still think that for cloud mass and number, you need to use in-cloud values. Unless you are also sampling zeros from the observations (i.e. the running sample includes zeros when there is not cloud). Please clarify.

For Figure 4, I don't see how truncation for sizes greater than 62.5 microns will INCREASE or DECREASE the number of ice crystals in bins larger than this. I think there is something incorrect about the truncation.

The ice is handled better, (truncation), but I still think there is something missing in the comparisons: the factor of 3-10 difference seems difficult to understand at the large scale. I think there is still something apples-to-oranges about the comparisons (see comment above). The comment below provides an avenue to address this.

You cannot really say that the models underestimate IWC (e.g., line 395, line 408). They underestimate IWC and number in the size range observed from the observations, but that could be a bias in the size distribution. The conclusions should probably be clarified on this point with making the deviation more specific to a size range.