Dear Rachel and co-authors,

Firstly, I would like to acknowledge the tremendous effort that has gone into producing this emission dataset and the value of this dataset to the global composition climate community, as indicated by the referees. I also thank them for their effort in reviewing your manuscript and for providing useful and constructive feedback. Many thanks to you for submitting your responses to their comments and for submitting a revised manuscript.

Secondly, I also sincerely apologise for the delay in reaching a decision on your manuscript.

Having read the reviewer comments, your responses to them, and the revisions you’ve made to the manuscript, I am pleased to inform you that your paper has been accepted for publication in Geosci. Model Development.

However, there are a small number of minor specific comments below which I would like you to implement before final publication.

Congratulations again to you and your co-authors on your efforts,

Regards,
Fiona O’Connor

Minor corrections:
1. Summary, page 35, line 1028: Replace “release of this data” with “the release of this data”
2. Summary, page 35, line 1036: Replace “inconstancies” with “inconsistencies”; Also, remove one of the two “that”
3. Referee (Alistair Sellar) had the following comment:

P2 L53: "(sometimes also as RCP historical data)" this is not a particularly meaningful phrase. I would suggest using only the name "CMIP5 dataset" for the collective historical and future dataset.”

to which you replied with:

This text has been changed to: “This data is also used as the historical starting point for the Representative Concentration Pathways (RCP) scenarios (van Vuuren et al., 2011) and in some research communities is referred to as the RCP historical data. In this article it is referred to as the CMIP5 data set.”

However, the revised manuscript does not include the full text from your response and I would ask that you correct this – see page 3, lines 93-95 (I think it has been altered in one place but not on page 3, lines 93-95)

4. Referee (Alistair Sellar) has the following specific comment:

P5 L160: Suggest "available" -> "documented" or "detailed"

Your reply was as follows:

Thank you. The following text now appears in the manuscript: Mapping of IEA products to CEDS fuels is provided in Sect.A3.

As above, the revised manuscript did not contain the response as indicated above. Although a minor point, may I please ask you to correct this oversight?

5. Referee (Alistair Sellar) made the following comment:

P23 L690: "In future versions of CEDS, quantitative uncertainty analysis will be included for all time periods, but is not complete as of the CMIP6 data version." Does this mean that there is partial uncertainty information in the CMIP6 data version, or none because you will wait for complete information before publishing any? If the former, please say something about the quantitative methodology.

Your response was:

There is no quantitative uncertainty analysis at this time other than what is already in the literature. (The text has been revised to refer to an existing literature summary.)

However, it is unclear to me that the text referred to was modified at all in the revised manuscript. Please clarify.

6. Referee (Alistair Sellar) commented:

P23 L694: "emissions concentrations are observed". Would "near-source concentrations" be a more accurate description?

You replied:

We would like to note that comparison to both near-source and far field observations can be helpful in comparisons such as these, and we have compared to both in the paper (Hassler et al. 2016and Kanaya et al. 2016).

I agree with the value of comparing to near-source and far field observations. However, I think the referee here is simply referring to your use of language in the phrase “emissions concentrations” rather than having a problem with your methodology. Therefore, I would like you to replace the phrase “emissions concentrations” to “concentrations of emitted species” (Pg 31, line 909)

7. Anonymous Referee #1 made the following comment:

L123: A reference is needed for the IPCC guidelines and Nomenclature for reporting document.

Your reply was:

This reference has been added. Thank you.

However, it is not clear that this reference has been added on page 5 line 158 of revised manuscript. Please add as requested by referee.

8. In response to Anonymous Referee #1, you have altered the legend of Figure 2. For consistency, I would suggest that you also alter the legend of other figures (e.g. Figure 3 and 5) as, again, no aircraft emissions are considered.

9. Anonymous Referee #1 asked for a table of uncertainties. While this would be beneficial, my feeling is that it is too big a request for this paper and would be more appropriate when CEDS emission uncertainty estimates have been developed and are being published. I accept your argument on this point.

10. Anonymous Referee #1 made a comment about the potential for two-way interaction between emission inventory developers and the modelling community. Although your response to this comment indicated that you had added something in the future work section, this wasn’t evident in the marked-up manuscript. Can you please a comment to the future work section? Thanks.