We sincerely thank the reviewer for the careful evaluation of our manuscript and for the constructive and insightful comments. We greatly appreciate the time and effort devoted to reviewing our work. The comments have helped us improve both the scientific presentation and the clarity of the manuscript. We have carefully considered all suggestions and revised the manuscript accordingly. In this response, your original comments are completely unedited and are given in yellow highlight, our responses are given in blue text and updates to the paper are given in purple text.

The revisions include: (1) clarifying the potential influence of biomass burning and residential solid-fuel combustion; (2) distinguishing the study domain from the facilities used in the source-category analysis; (3) clarifying the propagation of observational uncertainty into CO emission estimates and distinguishing this contribution from total emission uncertainty; (4) moderating claims regarding independent validation, EDGAR bias, policy effectiveness, and coal-fire seasonality; (5) adding a seasonally adjusted trend analysis with HAC standard errors and a seasonal Mann-Kendall robustness test; (6) quantifying the 37.9% endpoint decline and the 40.8% reduction in hotspot intensity; and (7) revising the text, captions, terminology, and statistical interpretation throughout the manuscript.

We sincerely thank the reviewer for the careful evaluation of our manuscript and for the constructive and insightful comments. We greatly appreciate the time and effort devoted to reviewing our work. The comments have helped us improve both the scientific presentation and the clarity of the manuscript. We have carefully considered all suggestions and revised the manuscript accordingly. In this response, your original comments are completely unedited and are given in yellow highlight, our responses are given in blue text and updates to the paper are given in purple text.

Following these comments, we have revised the manuscript. The major changes include: (1) clarifying that the comparison with EDGAR and coal-consumption data provides contextual and physical consistency checks rather than independent validation of the MFIEF inversion; (2) expanding the discussion of the limitations of the inversion in the absence of independent ground-based CO emission measurements; (3) quantitatively characterizing the interannual decline and weakening of emission hotspots; (4) clarifying the nature of the Wugonggou underground coal fire and separating its temporal behavior from interpretations associated with anthropogenic emission-control policies; (5) clarifying the definition and purpose of the valid-observation metric in Fig. 7; (6) highlighting the relationship between power-plant coal consumption and the derived emission factors; and (7) comprehensively revising the figures, captions, labels, terminology, and language throughout the manuscript.