The manuscript by Xu and coauthors presents new model developments within the IPSL Earth System Model framework, aimed at including vegetation dependence on desert dust emissions. Simulated fields are validated against observational datasets. The topic is of interest for the aerosol and climate modelling communities. Both the manuscript and the underlying scientific work are well crafted. This work is suitable publication after minor revisions, from my perspective.

Specific comments

67-68. Perhaps not many “original” studies such as, e.g. Marticorena and Bergametti (1995), but many “CMIP-class” models already include this effect, e.g. UKESM (Woodward et al., 2001: https://doi.org/10.1029/2000JD900795 ), CESM (Zender et al., 2003: https://doi.org/10.1029/2002JD002775 ), MPI (Stanelle et al., 2014: https://doi.org/10.1002/2014JD022062D ) among others.

155. Why only January? What about the Southern Hemisphere, for instance?

156. How is a “potential dust source area” defined?

157. Which variable is a “surface wetness proxy”?

191. Considering that fr >=1 by definition, there are three possible cases for the application of equation 4.4, from my understanding:

(1) u < ut < ut*fr , leading to no dust emissions

(2) u > ut*fr > ut , leading to dust emissions from both “pure” bare soil and bare soil between vegetation patches

(3) ut < u < ut*fr , resulting in positive emissions from “pure” bare soil but apparently negative emissions from bare soil between vegetation patches, which would pose some problems. Please clarify this aspect. 

16 (Supplement). Regridded how? Via bilinear interpolation?

252. Do you mean that deep convection follows the “Standard Physics” while turbulent mixing parameterizations  follows the New Physics” scheme?

296. Was this calculation done online or rather calculated a posteriori based on monthly output?

329. Are those scaling factors applied to dust emissions? If so, in the case of the 4-mode configuration you would imply changing the overall size distribution at emission. Please comment on that.

332. How was the overall calibration process carried out in order to determine the optimal scaling coefficients (considering all three variables)?

341. These processes apply to dust atmospheric dispersion in general, not specifically to PM10. This sentence seems out of place here.

374. I do not understand this distinction, since I could not find any subsequent budget segregating e.g. global land vs oceanic dust deposition.

491. It is not clear at which point those scaling factors were applied, i.e. online at the stage of dust emissions, or rather offline, on the monthly history files?

Please see the attached pdf.