Dear authors,

Thank you for submitting your revised manuscript. After reading it through together with your Response to Reviewers, I felt that you did a good job in the Response but that a couple of points were not fully accounted for in the revised text. These are things that you explain well in the Response to Reviewers but could benefit from adding an additional sentence or two in the manuscript, in case readers have similar thoughts. I therefore request the following minor additions, which I would quickly review before accepting the manuscript for publication in AMT. Specifically, these are:

1. The reviewers questioned the choice of the Henyey-Greenstein (HG) phase function. In your response you explained how this was evaluated in your previous 2016/2017 papers, which I think is reasonable, but I’d like to see this more clearly in the text. Could you add a sentence or two mentioning that HG has limitations but was evaluated for this purpose in the 2016/2017 papers somewhere probably early in section 2.3?

2. The reviewers also raised the issue of radiative closure resulting from MODIS (rather than OMI) as a source of AOD. In your Response you mention that you think it’s important to keep these results in the manuscript because as you note this possibility is not “naturally obvious”. I agree with you about this and support keeping the analysis as-is, but again adding a sentence somewhere in Section 5.5 (e.g. strengthen the final paragraph of section 5.5 a little) or 6 noting this fact would be useful.

What I am suggesting is essentially taking some of the rationale you provided in the Response to Reviewers, and inserting similar text into the manuscript itself, as it is likely that most readers of the final paper will not go back and read through the original peer review.

Please let me know if you have any questions about the above, and I look forward to seeing the next and probably final version.

Best wishes,

Andrew

Dear authors,

Thank you very much for the submission of these additional revisions to your manuscript. After reading them through, I am pleased to accept this version of the study for publication in AMT.

Best wishes,

Andrew