Dear Cosmin,

Well done on considerably improving your manuscript. The only remaining criticism of the reviewer does, however, strike a chord with me, so I would like a response from you. They would like to see your code made more permanently available. I did originally ask for a code availability paragraph to be included in the manuscript, but you opted instead to include some information at various parts of the manuscript, including footnotes. You may want to reconsider that paragraph...?

Comment from reviewer:
"The only review item that I continue to be concerned about is 'reproducibility'. In the author's response it was said that the workflow would be 'available upon request'. It has been shown that materials that are 'available upon request' have a half-life of 18 months (i.e. 50% of such materials are unrecoverable after 1.5 years), to me that does not constitute reproducibility. This is great work and I continue to encourage the authors to make their full workflow available, not just a pointer to the software used. That should include the version of DALEC used, input drivers, data used for assimilation, scripts, etc. "

The other thing is that I recommend is that you to check all your equations very carefully. I have only skimmed the equations to see that they basically look reasonable, and while reviewers may have read some of them very carefully, they probably have not checked them all. So it is really up to you to make them perfect.

jules

Thanks for uploading the code. Interesting that this caused you to squash a bug. I had a look at the upload, read the readme file and it all looks reasonable to me. Since it is not an absolute requirement to upload code for this particular paper and given that the code upload has occurred at this late stage, I think it is better for me to accept the paper as is, and leave it for you to double-check the supplement at the proof stage. ...which is a long hand way of saying that I have not compiled your code myself. I recommend that, at the proof stage, you download the supplement from Copernicus and check again that compilation from the download is successful.

Best wishes,
jules