Dear Dr. Bouvier,

Thank you for all the work from you and your co-authors in addressing the reviewer concerns. This is a very cool paper. At this stage I am happy to accept this paper for publication in GMD pending some technical revisions. The revisions mainly involve modifying language to avoid ambiguity, though I do have an apparent discrepancy to note.

Requested revisions follow my signature.

With Kind Regards,
-Travis O'Brien-



**Note**: Line numbers in the following refer to the author track changed version of the article.

l18: suggest rewording to "create a large ensemble of baroclinic lifecycles"

l22: I suggest rewording this sentence as "These GCMs provide numerical solutions to the governing equations..."

l57: you use the term "run without physics" which is potentially ambiguous (since GCMs numerically approximate conservation equations that are derived from first-principles physics). I take it that you mean "run without physics parameterizations"? If so, I suggest using that rewording. There are some other places in the text where the term "physics" should be reworded as "physics parameterization(s)".

l60: I suggest adding "e.g., " before "Kuo et al., 1991,..." since these are only a representative sample of papers on this topic

l65: "physics" -> "physics parameterizations"

l218: The last sentence of this paragraph seems like a non-sequitur. Consider whether it is necessary here.

l230: "Implementation into OpenIFS" -> "Implementation in OpenIFS"

l244: I suggest rewording th sentence "It was attributed..." as "This background state was referred to as NTESTCASE41 (dry case)..."

l254: "physics" -> "physics parameterizations"

l255: "Hence, the SST definition presented Section 2.3" -> "Hence we use the SST definition presented in Section 2.3"

l274: The sentence starting with "The proposed background state" is confusing, and I'm not sure how to interpret what you intended to communicate. Part of my confusion is that you start the sentence talking about the background state (which I take to be the initial conditions of the model state variables), but then the sentence discusses parameterization details: it seems like the sentence is implying that the background state and parameterizations are equivalent. This sentence should be revised.

l286: "humidity (HDIRQ) diffusions) and the other are set to zero." ->" humidity (HDIRQ) diffusions, and the other coefficients are set to zero.

l299: "A standalone version have been developed" -> "A standalone version has been developed"

l308: it looks like there is an extra ")" after 2023-12-05

l340: it has been hundreds of lines since BWS was defined, and it isn't a terribly common acronym; I had forgotten the acronym's meaning by the time I got to this sentence. It might be better to use the whole phrase here rather than the acronym.

l347: "to enable to first" -> "to enable the first"

Figure 4e: in the vicinity of latitudes -20 and 20, theta-E is non-monotonic. It decreases from approximately 345K at the surface to 240K at about 500 hPa, and then it increases again after that. This seems to suggest there is conditional instability in this region. Line 330 seems to indicate that you are aiming to create the theta-E profiles such that they increase monotonically everywhere. Does the language around line 330 need to be revised?

line 480: the sentence refers to 'friction' twice, which seems like it might be a typo

line 536: "However, as this CAPE can only be addressed" -> "However, as this CAPE can only be accessed"