Review comments of “Sensitivity of ice cloud radiative heating to optical, macro- and microphysical properties” by Edgardo I. Sepulveda Araya et al.

This paper presents an interesting study conducting a series of idealized single-column radiative transfer calculations to show how ice cloud vertical radiative heating (CRH) changes when different optical property schemes with different levels of ice crystal complexities are involved. Four ice optical schemes for a range of ice cloud formation temperatures or altitudes,

geometrical depths, ice water paths (IWP), and ice crystal effective radii are considered. The results are helpful to the readers in knowing the impacts of different ice property scheme on ice cloud CRH simulations. The topic is within the scope of ACP, and the paper is logically organized and clearly written. I mostly support the publication of this paper, but there are some suggestions for the authors and some concerns to be addressed.

1. The authors may need to consider changing the title. The present title seems to be broad and comprehensive, but in fact, the present study has several limitations, such as idealized, single-column calculation, a few (not all) cloud properties, and for several optical schemes.

2. It is suggested that the authors show more details (figures and discussions) about the four ice optical schemes used in this study, such as the mass extinction coefficients, single-scattering albedo, asymmetry factor, etc., in the main text.. so that the readers could have a better understanding of the optical properties before reading the sensitivity studies for better comprehension.

3. Although the authors have already done a lot of work to evaluate the sensitivities of ice cloud radiative heating to optical, macro- and microphysical properties, the results still seem to be limited given that many more key parameters are fixed here (line 100-105), such as the skin temperature, tropical oceans, SW surface albedo, LW surface emissivity, effective solar zenith angle (SZA), etc. How would the different settings of these parameters could possibly affect the validity and magnitude of the present results? I think the results would be even quite valuable if the authors could elaborate on this.

4. The figure captions in this paper looks weird. The authors may need to explain what the figures are before discussing the details. For example, Figure captions of 1, 2, and 3.

5. The last but important thing that the readers would care about, is how well the simulations perform as compared to the reality? This again would be very helpful and valuable if the authors could elaborate on this question.