Dear Dr. Williams,

I have now completed my reading of your revised manuscript in the light of
the reviewers comments. Both referees recommend acceptance after minor
revisions. I see that you have taken taken their comments and suggestions
into account and that you have made an largely adequate revision of
the text.

I would, however, like to come back to comment 5 of reviewer #1, for which
you argue that the mentioned points lie outside the scope of the paper.
I think that reviewer #1 makes a very important point here. In GMD we also
expect the applicability of the presented models to be discussed, which is
exactly what the reviewer asks for. One should furthermore not forget that
our readership is very wide. Positioning your work into this greater context
(strengths/weaknesses, etc.) is therefore an important aspect.
I would thus invite you to reconsider your answer to that
particular comment and to provide a few sentences of discussion
(as a guideline, I would suggest of the order of ten lines of text).


I also have several additional, mostly technical, comments -- see below.



Best regards,

Guy Munhoven



Revised manuscript

page 1: author affiliations: there is a starred note ('* previously at ...')
after the affiliations, but no author name with a starred reference (should be
Halloran ?) -- please check

Page 2, line 47: duplicate word 'studies'

Page 3, line 40: OCMIP (2014) is somewhat misleading as a reference, as OCMIP
has been completed long ago (at least phase 2 which this how-to belongs to)
It would be more appropriate to refer to that document as Najjar and Orr (1999)
(i.e., authors and last revision date given in the document), and specify the
last access date in the reference list only.

page 4, line 88: temperature expressed on the Celsius scale has
units of 'degrees Celsius', not 'Celsius'

page 4, line 3: spurious comma in the reference 'Williams et al., (2013)'

page 5, line 129: 'occurring' should probably read 'occur'

page 5, line 140: for clarity, please replace 'the authors' by the
actual names/reference

page 9, line 283: 'basin in now considered' should read 'basin is now considered'

page 10, lines 301-304: please check this sentence
('This compensation ... combine ...' ???)

page 10, line 324: 'undestanding' should read 'understanding'

page 17, figure 6: in the bottom left and right panels, the large eye-catching
black blob indicates a completely saturated colour scale. It looks as if the
colour scale would have extend down to -90% or so, which is not entirely
practical either as it would squeeze the useful parts of the graph too much.
I see two possibilities to solve this problem:
(1) use a non-linear scale, or
(2) leave it as it is, clearly state this fact in the legend, and also indicate
the actual minimum values.