Dear authors,

Thank you for making such a large effort to improve the manuscript, it looks very good now. However, I am still not quite satisfied with the way the abstract and the discussion are written: the sentences in which you present your many results are not always easy to follow. I would recommend grouping the results into bullet points or short statements in the discussion, distilling out only the most important information.
For example, you could reformulate the statements on lines 572-580 (in the revised manuscript) in the following way:
"In addition to the comparison of temporal and spatial means, the agreement between single observations and daily means was studied to take into account the island setting (leading to surface inhomogeneity within satellite pixels) and cloud cover effects. The results from the study of single observations are very similar to those for temporally and spatially averaged data (but more noisy), which implies that (1) using single observations for validation yields meaningful results and (2) surface or cloud effects cause no large systematic errors in the comparison using temporally and spatially averaged observations."

Please try to re-phrase the other important results in a similar way and place the statement about single observations after the results it refers to (i.e., from the temporal and spatial means). After re-structuring the discussion section in this manner, I advise you to update the abstract accordingly, including only the most important, but certainly not all, results.

After these alterations have been done to my satisfaction, the manuscript can be published in AMT.

I have, however, one request regarding future re-submissions: please always include a manuscript in which the revisions are marked. This makes the editor' s and reviewers' jobs a lot easier!

Kind regards,
Marloes Gutenstein-Penning de Vries

Dear authors,

After the re-submission of your manuscript I made some specific recommendations that I did not see addressed yet. I wrote:
"Thank you for making such a large effort to improve the manuscript, it looks very good now. However, I am still not quite satisfied with the way the abstract and the discussion are written: the sentences in which you present your many results are not always easy to follow. I would recommend grouping the results into bullet points or short statements in the discussion, distilling out only the most important information.
For example, you could reformulate the statements on lines 572-580 (in the revised manuscript) in the following way:
"In addition to the comparison of temporal and spatial means, the agreement between single observations and daily means was studied to take into account the island setting (leading to surface inhomogeneity within satellite pixels) and cloud cover effects. The results from the study of single observations are very similar to those for temporally and spatially averaged data (but more noisy), which implies that (1) using single observations for validation yields meaningful results and (2) surface or cloud effects cause no large systematic errors in the comparison using temporally and spatially averaged observations."

Please try to re-phrase the other important results in a similar way and place the statement about single observations after the results it refers to (i.e., from the temporal and spatial means). After re-structuring the discussion section in this manner, I advise you to update the abstract accordingly, including only the most important, but certainly not all, results.

After these alterations have been done to my satisfaction, the manuscript can be published in AMT."

Please react to these suggestions so that we can proceed with the publication of the manuscript.

Kind regards,

Marloes Gutenstein-Penning de Vries