We would like to thank the reviewer for their interest to our paper and for the valuable comments they gave.

                                                                     

The only major thing requested by both reviewers is the quantitative evaluation of the simulations. 

As we stated in the response to RC2, standard metrics used for model-measurement comparison

are suboptimal for the case.  We have performed evaluation using more robust metrics, and

a section on quantitative evaluation of the model performance will be added to the final manuscript.

                                                                     

We will also account for all the minor points that have been raised raised by the reviewer.  

We would like to thank the reviewer for their interest to our paper and for the valuable comments they gave.                                            

                                                                                                                                                        

The reviewer's comments largely repeat the comments given on a preprint submission stage, and we believe most of them have been mostly addressed already in the published discussion paper. We will add the complete updated response together with the revised paper.                                                                

                                                                                                                                                        

The updated comment has two more points:                                                                                                                

                                                                                                                                                        

>>The conclusions are vague, not providing the values obtained when applying this methodology and how much it deviates from the observations used to validate this study.

The problem of the evaluation for the performed simulations is that one has to compare observed methane to the excess methane forecasted by the model. In case of a large excess it is relatively straightforward to select a background value, and compare excesses. These cases constitute a small fraction of the observations, so fitting these data can be achieved with rather unrealistic emission profiles (such as one given by Jia et al., 2022) study. Moreover, due to the small spatial extent of the source, small inaccuracies in the dispersion model and/or driving meteorology can lead to significant discrepancies between model and observations even for perfectly accurate emission profiles. Therefore larger dataset is needed for a robust model evaluation.

                                                                                                                                                        

For most of the stations the excess is of the same order as the natural variability. For such cases  subtraction of background becomes a poorly defined procedure.

                                                                                                                                                        

To address this difficulty, in the published preprint we showed plots where the modelled methane excesses were plotted in the same scale as observed methane concentrations. The plots qualitatively show that the emission with the dynamic injection height improves the modelling results compared to a fixed injection profile.

                                                                                                                                                        

For the revised version we involved several metrics that allow for variable background to provide a quantitative measure of the simulation quality at different assumptions of the injection height. 

                                                                                                                             

>>Why 3x95,000 tons and not 285 000 or 285kT?

                                                                                                                                                        

The idea was to point that in our vision there were three identical pipes with equal amount of gas in them. We'll put total  285kT figure in the final paper.