Dear Dr. Thomas, dear Gary,

Thank you very much for the careful revision of your manuscript.

I have reviewed your Response to the reviewers as well as the changes made to the manuscript. As a result, I consider the manuscript almost ready for acceptance except for one point requiring more clarification:

One of the reviwers had already asked for justification of how systematic errors of the SBUV-data were estimated. Corresponding clarifications are now added on page 12, lines 10-13 of the revised manuscript.

In my view, some more clarification is required here: how exactly was half of the data of an entire season removed from the data set? Was that done my randomly choosing data points (which would be appropriate) or by just taking the first and second half of the season? In the latter case, I would be sceptical about the procedure because of the pronounced seasonal variation of PMC. Please clarify.

Thank you very much for clarifying this final Point.

I am looking forward to seeing this excellent paper published in AMT.

Best regards,

Markus Rapp
(Assoc. Editor)