Dear authors,

Thank you for making an effort of revising your manuscript; I feel that essentially all comments obtained a good response. Nevertheless, I have a suggestion to make the abstract somewhat more attractive to readers (see below) and I would like you to make some minor changes to Figures 2 and 6. After addressing those issues, I will gladly accept your interesting paper!

Kind regards,
Marloes Gutenstein


Edits:

I suggest you substitute the first few lines of the abstract (up to ''The method...'') with something like the following text.

''Remotely sensed brightness temperatures from passive observations in the microwave (MW) range are used to retrieve various geophysical parameters, e.g., near-surface temperature. Cloud contamination, although less of an issue at MW than at visible to infrared wavelengths, may adversely affect retrieval quality, particularly in the presence of strong cloud formation (convective towers) or precipitation. To limit errors associated with cloud contamination, we present an index derived from MW brightness temperature observations which assesses the degree of residual cloud contamination.''


Furthermore, I have the following comments to your figures:

Fig. 2: put a label on the left-most y-axes and place the panel titles (e.g., ''18 GHz (V) over ocean'') within the panel so that it cannot be mistaken for the x-axis label of the upper four plots.

Fig. 6: Try to make this less crowded by placing the panel titles (e.g., ''Flagged cells predicted by model (..) threshold'') in the figure caption and labelling each panel A, B, C, D, and E. This also makes referencing in the text easier.