Dear authors,

I will accept your revised paper after the following corrections are made.

P. 3, ll. 8/9: can you explain "dense water formation". The reader unfamiliar with this expression has to wait until Page 18 where (s)he learns that it has to do with the salinity of sea water. This explanation should be given already here.

P. 3, ll. 18-21: fix order of brackets.

P. 4, ll. 7-10: Probably this is something you forgot to delete when inserting new text.

P. 4, l. 12: either delete "the" or explain which hydrological and ocean models you refer to.

P. 6, l. 26: either write 1h30m or 1.5h.

P. 7/8, last and first line: it is not clear what the sentence in brackets means. What refers to first and second week.

P. 10, ll. 5-10: The statement that some balloon measurements were discarded appears twice. Also "sampling pace" should be replaced by "sampling rate".

P. 10, l. 23: the expression "horizontal thinning" is a bit ugly. Perhaps "horizontal sampling" would be a good alternative. The same in line 25.

P. 12, l. 5: What do you mean with "intermediate cloudiness"? Are these clouds in the mid troposphere or clouds with about 50% coverage?

P. 12, l. 20: "update procedure".

P. 12, l. 22: please note that the plural of aircraft is aircraft, without an "s" at the end.

Figure 6: is sufficiently large now, but in the caption it should be top and bottom, not left and right.

P. 15. last line: Still I do not understand what you mean here. I believe you want to say that half of the stations had at least one missing data, but what is the 7%? Is it the total fraction of missing data?

P. 16, l. 13: delete one instance of "5%".

Figure 12, caption, last line: "There is no difference" or "there are no differences". One full stop at the end suffices.

Figure 14, caption: Please rewrite the last sentence. For instance: Stars represent the statistical significance of the difference between the two models, which is 90% for all forecast ranges above 12 hours.

P. 19, l. 22: "margin error" -> "error margin".

P. 19, l. 24: Cut-and-Paste error.

P. 19, ll. 24/25: "The difference ... are ... drawn from" is grammatically and factually incorrect (differences are not drawn).

P. 20, ll. 1-3: This sentence needs to be reworked as well.

Figure 18, caption: Please rewrite the last sentence. For instance: Stars indicate where the statistical significance of the difference between the two models exceeds 90%.

Eq. A4: Please check whether there is a difference between DD and dd. If not, make consistent.