Dear Authors,

Thank you for submitting “Characterization of liquid cloud profiles using global collocated active radar and passive polarimetric cloud measurements” and for your thoughtful responses to the reviews.

This study offers a valuable global perspective on stratiform liquid cloud profile shapes using CloudSat and POLDER. The identification of dominant profile morphologies, the passive estimation framework (MLR/RF), and the active–passive case study are timely and relevant to current and upcoming polarimetric imagers.

However, the discussion with the reviewers surfaced several substantive concerns that must be addressed before the paper can be considered for publication. In addition to the reviewers’ points (not repeated here), I want to emphasize that the proposed method relies critically on a cloud-base height (CBH) retrieval described only in an unpublished study. Reviewers must be able to evaluate all essential inputs within the present submission. Please revise to make the CBH component fully self-contained. Specifically:

1. Add a Methods + Supplement section that documents the CBH algorithm in sufficient detail for reproduction (data and matchups; predictors/features; model architecture and hyperparameters; training/validation design and leakage controls; metrics by regime; and inference steps).

2. Publicly archive the CBH materials (e.g., a preprint or methods note) and provide a stable citation. This is for transparency; the current paper must still be self-contained.

3. Release code/model artifacts and a minimal dataset slice under a permanent DOI, and include a clear Data & Code Availability statement.

4. Provide an ablation/uncertainty analysis quantifying how CBH errors propagate into TP_CER/TP_NCOT and the reconstructed profiles (include a “perfect CBH” benchmark for context).

If these items cannot be addressed in this revision, please either narrow the scope to exclude CBH-dependent claims or consider resubmission once the CBH method is publicly documented.


Best regards,
-Zhibo Zhang
Associate Editor
Professor of Physics, UMBC