Dear Daniel and co-authors,

First of all, please accept my apologies for the delay in making a decision on your revised manuscript. I fully understand your concern about the delay, particularly given the effort that you and your co-authors have gone to, in order to address the reviewers' comments.

Having fully read the original and revised manuscripts, along with the reviewers' comments and your responses to them, I can make the following assessment:

1. Reviewer 1 felt that the paper was well-written and interesting but that it did not represent a "significant amount of new science". Apart from that, they gave no specific comments on how you could improve the manuscript. However, you have reiterated the complementarity of considering both the SW and LW and the new aspects (e.g. computational cost, spatial sampling, and assessment of the use of monthly mean profiles) have added to the revised manuscript.

2. Reviewer 2 felt that the paper was "well written, addresses an important research
need faced by the community, and suits the journal very well. " However, they felt that some investigation on the use of monthly mean profiles was warranted as well as some benchmarking on computational cost. The revised manuscript has clearly addressed these two comments.

3. Reviewer 3 stated that the manuscript was "an excellent presentation of new techniques that can be applied to evaluating climate models and is a valuable addition to the literature". Many of the specific comments were to improve the reach of the manuscript and the revised manuscript has addressed these comments sufficiently well.

4. Reviewer 4 felt that the manuscript "lacked focus and that it seemed to mainly report on existing results." This reviewer also stated that "the authors would benefit from making their goals for the manuscript more explicit". Another major concern was "the fact that the CCSM/MODTRAN calculations appear to be have been described by the authors in previous papers (the Feldman papers from 2011 and 2013). The calculations made for MIROC5 and HadGAM2-ES appear to be novel (though one would like stronger assurances that using monthly-mean fields in place
of instantaneous snapshots does not introduce important artifacts)." In this case, the calculations with MIROC5 and HadGEM2-ES are indeed novel and you've addressed concerns about using monthly mean output. In addition, the revised manuscript demonstrates the feasibility of implementing inline satellite simulation more widely in GCMs. As such, it helps make the manuscript fit better within the scope of the GMD journal. And you've reiterated the potential associated with pan-spectral capability.

As a result, on balance, I would like to recommend that you paper is published.

Again, please accept my apologies for the delay in making a decision and thanks for taking the time to submit a revised manuscript.

Regards,
Fiona O'Connor