Good progress is being made, but this paper doesn't yet meet the standard for a GMD paper. Model description papers need to contain sufficient evaluation to show that the model behaves as expected, and the evidence must be comprehensible to those outside of the group of people developing the model. In this case the evaluation is performed with reference to previous evaluations of previous model versions or parts of the same model. This is an acceptable approach. However, the evaluation needs to be presented in a form that is useful to readers outside of the EMS model development community. This means that much more description and explanation of the results is required in the main manuscript (as suggested by the reviewer), with essential plots being brought from the supplement into the main manuscript.

The manuscript is getting quite close to being acceptable now.

In the main text, please move the Code and data availability section to the correct place in the manuscript (after Conclusions). I noticed that there should be an "s" on the last word of section 14.2 so please correct that and go through and look for other grammatical errors. The manuscript will be copyedited but the more mistakes we catch now, the fewer there should be in the final version.

At GMD, Appendices are included in the main manuscript not in the Supplement. You therefore need to change the labels on the sections of the supplement. Maybe S1, S2 etc rather than Appendix A,B....

Please explain the provenance of the presently labelled section Appendix E in the Supplement. There is a page within this Appendix that refers to previous versions of the document and the style is that of an internal report. This makes me think it is actually a CSIRO internal report. If this is the case, the authors of the report need to be listed and their permission gained to the report to be included in the supplement and I would prefer this to be uploaded as a separate standalone file in the Supplement, in its original format.

We had an exchange over email regarding the status of the supplement.

Mark (first author) stated in that email that the supplement with the CSIRO logo was written by Jennifer Skerratt who is a co-author on the manuscript. This authorship needs to be stated on the supplement itself and also acknowledged in the author contributions paragraph of the manuscript.

With authorship of the supplement now clear, I would prefer that you remove the CSIRO logo from the supplement, as it does make it look like an internal report and this could cause confusion. You could add further acknowledgements to other CSIRO staff in the supplement if appropriate. As the supplement is not a pre-existing CSIRO report, any individuals that have a large role in the supplement and are not presently named in the authorship should be included as authors of the manuscript. Their role as contributing only to the supplement can be clearly specified in the author contribution section of the main manuscript.