The authors present airborne lidar observations of Saharan mineral dust during the EUREC⁴A campaign in the Barbados region in January and February 2020. The measured data are of interest to the readers of ACP but the work needs major revisions before it can be considered for publication:

- The biggest issue to me is that the authors seem to draw quite general conclusions from what really is a case study of an individual event. I'd therefore urge them to not overinterpret the findings and clearly state that these measurements - unique as they are - mark a limited sample that does not allow for drawing more general conclusions. This should also be expressed by re-categorization of the manuscript type as Measurement Report and a change of title to, e.g. Airborne lidar observations of a case of wintertime Saharan dust transport towards the Caribbean during EUREC⁴A.

- Figure 1 should be omitted. The same is shown in a much better way in Figure 2.

- The methods section (maybe better data and methods?) should also include the auxiliary data use in your work, i.e. MODIS, HYSPLIT, etc. Lines 173 to 193 should be moved to that section and expanded towards a discussion of typical values.

- Figures 3 and 4 should be split into three figures each and places at positions in the text so that the reader doesn't have to go back and forth to follow their discussion. As is, the panels in Figure 3 are too small. The last sentence in the caption of Figure 3 should be moved to the methodology section. A statement regading the grey shaded areas should be mentioned.

Minor Issues:

- line 15: is there an estimate of the dust contribtution based on measurements?

- line 21: transport instead of transportation

- line 24: the Intertropical Convergence Zone is generally referred to as ITCZ 

- line 44: cloud condensation nuclei

- line 50: this region instead of these regions

- line 53: What plumes?

- line 70: enable a characterization of winter-time dust transport: please clearly state that you are discussing just three research flights within four days and that those flights are likely to cover the same dust event. In that context, your aim of characterizing winter-time dust transport is quite overstates what is possible with your data set.

- Figure 2 and related text: Please : at what wavelength of AOD measurement. Caption: one station is marked by one dot.

- lines 93 - 96: You could drop the index 532 after clearly stating that all measurements have been performed at that wavelength.

- line 98: Please clarify for the non-experts that DIAL gives the water vapour profiles and that HSRL gives the aerosol profiles.

- line 114: add reference to 10.1029/2009JD011862 and 10.1111/j.1600-0889.2011.00548.x regarding the use of lidar measurements to characterize aerosol mixtures

- line 143 and 145: AT these altitudes

- Figure 5: please add the abbreviations for the different aerosol types (MA, DU, BB) in line 3 of the caption when marking their colour in the plot.

- line 211: dominates the aerosol mixture?

- Figure 6: Is it possible to apply the information from Figure 5 to this plot to get more quantitative results rather than the coarse ellipses?

General comments

The authors focused their study on the airborne lidar measurements done in the vicinity of Barbados, upstream the Caribbean Island in January/February 2020. Measurements, methodology, data and analysis are of high interest to the remote sensing scientific community. The overall quality of the preprint paper is high. This is well written study with new findings related to wintertime long-range transport of Saharan dust plumes across the tropical Atlantic. The structure and the content of each paragraph is appropriate. Therefore, I recommend this work to be published in ACP.

The Reviewer 1 and comment#2 provided detailed review, so I can add just some technical comments.

First, I would like to underline that I consider the title to be appropriate and also, I like the presentation of the results in Fig.3. This way it is more visible the variability of the measurements during the three flights.

I agree with TROPOS team (comment#2):

• the lidar scientists will use your measurements in follow-on papers, so please consider TROPOS suggestions
• previous campaigns should be mentioned and also references to their publications

Minor technical suggestion /corrections

• Figure 1 should be moved in section 2.1 (after it is mentioned in the text). I think it should be kept in the manuscript; it gives the exact overlaying of the flights
• Table 1 should be moved in section 3.1 (after it is mentioned in the text)
• Please specify in the caption what is the grey shaded areas on the right panels of fig.3