Dear authors,

I read the paper and your responses. I appreciate the detail to which you responded to the spinup concerns of reviewer 1 and the quantification of trends and bias in the standard deviations by reveiwer 2. I will accept the paper, including the supplement, pending some minor revisions. These include the following:

1) Although layer 1 of the soil seems spun up after a year, the lower layers are not. You describe that adequately, but the statement that only the root zone is relevant is a bit at odds with the need for the model improvements. For longer term the spinup in the deeper soil could have an effect, but we cannot know with these experiments. Could you rephrase a little bit?
2) The comparison to CMIP5 coupled models is not fair. SST is prescribed here, so the model would always do a reasonable job in many meteorological parameters (at least averages). So, the comment should be made more careful and it would be good to have a reference to CMIP5 AMIP results here instead of the coupled results.
3) GMD supports open access of code and data. Your code is not available and the link to the workshop does not work. A persistent identifier to the code would be preferable, even if the model software liscence doesnt allow the software to be open (e.g. via ZENODO) and a link that does not break as well. Moreover, is it possible to make the data on which this model evaluation is based open? For instances via DATACITE you can make your data findable.


Kind regards,
Wilco Hazeleger

Dear Authors,

Thank you for revising the manuscript taking into account the minor comments. I am glad to accept the paper for GMD. The Weather@Home project and its results is very relevant to the community and it is very valuable to have the evaluation published. Thank you for submitting to GMD and my apologies for some delays in the procedure,

Best regards,
Wilco Hazeleger