Dear authors,

please find enclosed two referee reports. Both referee's point out that the prevsiou made referee comments have not been fully considered and that still further revisions are necessary until the paper is suitable for publication.

I would like to ask you to follow the referee's comments. I agree with the two referee's that following their comments will improve the paper signficantly and make it suitable for publication in ACP. If you need more time to make the revisions you can ask the ACP Editorial office for more time.

Best regards, Farahnaz Khosrawi

Dear authors,

I am sorry to inform you that despite the effort and time you have spent on the revision of the manuscript it is still not ready for publication in ACP. As was pointed out by the referees the manuscript still suffers from some shortcomings that need to be cleared out before the paper can be accepted for publication. I would like to ask you to follow both, the referees and my comments and improve the manuscript accordingly. Note, we cannot do iteration over iteration. At some point I have to make a final decision. I strongly recommend you to carefully follow the referees and my comments since otherwise I won't be able to accept the paper for publication. ACP has a certain quality standard and it is necessary that all papers fulfill this standard. If you cannot achieve this there will be no other possibility for you than to try to publish the paper in another journal.

You should take the time that is necessary to make the improvements. There is generally no problem to get more time for doing the revision. In case you need more time just contact the Copernicus Editorial. I further would like to ask you to highlight changes in the manuscript in bold face to make it easier for me and the referee to track what actually has been changed in the manuscript.

Abstract:
The abstract needs to be improved. It should be more concise what the purpose of your study is. What is the motivation? Why do you look at trends in winds. What does it mean for the atmospheric system is there is a trend in wind speed? Does it has an influence on NAO, QBO or SSW.

More specifically: Why do NAO and QBO or SSW have an influence on the trend? Shouldn't it be rather vice versa? If there is a trend in horizontal wind will it have an effect on wind driven phenomena as QBO, NAO or SSW?

L13: Add what the abbreviation NCEP is standing for.

L17: Seems? At this stage of your study it should be clear what the most important result is.

L21: What are the abbreviations ERA and MERRA standing for? Please add.

L71: Same for ENSO. One of the reviewers already asked you during the previous revision to introduce all abbreviations, but this has obviously not been done.

L74: Which phenomena. Give an example.

L77: Of what? Please be more concise. Has the strong effect at 10 hPa been found in a previous study or in this study?

L80: Skip “other”

General comments on the Introduction:
It becomes clear from the introduction what your analyses consists of, but not why you are doing this. For example, why do you think the latitudinal distribution of meridional wind could be interesting? To just state nobody has done that before is not enough. There should be a motivation for why you doing this study and this motivation should be clearly stated in the introductions so that it becomes clear to the reader what the purpose and benefit of your study is.

L93: “Rufenacht” schould read “Rüfenacht”.

L92: Add also the study by Baron et al. (2013) who derive winds from SMILES.

L97: What is NCEP/NCAR-1 standing for? Add what the abbreviation is standing for.

L120: Why do you choose 100 and 10 hPa. What dynamics and conditions are pronounced in these altitudes at middle latitudes? Why middle latitudes? Why don't you choose the tropics or polar regions for your study?

L121: Why choosing three latitudes? Why is it not possible to perform the analyses in a latitude band? I cannot follow your argumentation with the land/sea distribution. The NCEP data is available globally.

L136: Skip text in brackets “(using standard MATLAB routine)”

L139: How do you divide the data into several groups? Which criteria are used?

L176: Why have these three different time periods been chosen?

L179: Why is the trend in wind significant, but not the trend in NAO?

L184: Why have these time periods been chosen? Why do they differ from the ones which have been chosen before?

L269: skip “for”

General comment on the Method section: Why has for every part of the study other longitudes and latitudes been chosen? What is your motivation for the specific selection? Why do you need for each sub study another set of latitudes/longitudes and time periods? This causes a lot of confusion.

General comment on the Result section: I still cannot follow how you derive proof for that QBO, NAO and so on have an influence on the trends in wind speed.

Best regards, Farahnaz Khosrawi

Dear authors,

please find enclosed two referee reports. Unfortunately, the paper still cannot be accepted for publication in ACP. However, both referee have acknowledged the effort you have put into revising your manuscript and agreed to give you another chance to improve the manuscript. Please consider all the comcments done by the referee and improve your paper accordingly.

Best regards, Farahnaz Khosrawi

Dear authors,

please find enclosed the report from referee one. Unfortunately, there are still some (minor) revisions necessary before publication in ACP.

The major point of the referee is that you really need to improve the language in your paper to get the message through. It is not enough to just correct the English grammar to get a correct sentence, you also have to check if your message is still the same after the sentence is corrected.

Additionally to the referee's suggestions for improvement I would like you to consider the following:

L23: "reanalysis" or "reanalyzes": Singular and Plural should be used correctly and you should decide on either using British English or American English (and use it consequent throughout the manuscript).

"analysis" = singular, "analyses" = plural (same for BE and AE), but "to analyze"=AE and "to analyse"=BE

L29: What is meant with "ozone depletion development"? Do you mean during polar winter when the ozone hole forms? What is meant with “ozone trend turnaround”?

L126: It should read "SMILES" (and not "SMILE")

L126: The instrument name stands for Superconducting Submillimetre-wave Limb-emission Sounder. Please correct this.

L130: See comment above (L23).

L188: see comment above (L23).

L215: Which height? Do you mean geopotential height or do you mean the Aleutian high pressure?

These are also only examples. So, please check the manuscript thoroughly and do the necessary corrections.

Best regards, Farahnaz Khosrawi

Dear authors,

before your paper can be published in ACP I would like to ask you to consider the following technical corrections listed below:

L11: skip "the" so that it reads ".....for stratospheric ozone".

L13: add "the" so that it reads ".....on the ozone distribution".

L23: "practically" --> please rephrase.

L23: include "data sets" so that it reads "different reanalysis data sets".

L25: add "the" so that it reads "...to the Aleutian high".

L27: add "hemisphere" so that it reads "...northern hemisphere middle stratosphere". I guess you refer here to the northern hemisphere.

L28: Add "of meridional winds" so that it reads "Trends of meridional wind are....".

L30: "They"? Who? The meridional winds? Please state that clearly and don't write just "They".

L59: add "the" so that it reads "in the polar region....".

L83: Skip "shall".

L86: write "in this paper" instead of "in the paper".

L99: skip "the" so that it reads "in stratospheric dynamics".

L135: remove obsolete space between Interim and the bracket.

L155: add "from" so that it reads "from each other".

L170: skip "again".

L208: skip "here".

L211: add "a" so that it reads "shows a climatology".

L218: Which dynamical reasons. Please clkarify or give some examples.

L234: skip "here".

L238: skip "the" so that it reads "change of trends".

L254: it should read "dynamical" and instead of situations it should read "processes".

L270: mixture of singular and plural. It should read either "a slightly stronger trend" or "slightly stronger trends".

L272: space between "and" and the coordinates is missing.

L290: "biggest" should read "largest".

L312: skip "the" so that it reads "result in wave propagation".

L328-329: This sentence should be rephrased. It could read e.g. "In future studies, processes of the lower and higher levels of the atmosphere have to be analysed to find the main driver of these changes." Further, it should be stated clearly which changes and which altitudes (below xx hPa and above xx hPa).

L351: add "as a" so tha tit reads "than as a cause".

L362: What is meant with all years trend? Do you mean all seasons during one year or a time period consisting of several years?

L392: "higher" should read "high".

L406: "don" should read "on".

Please note: As I remember colors in tables can not be used in the published articles in ACP. You need to change or tables and captions accordingly. Please contact in that matter the ACP Copy-editing staff.

Best regards, Farahnaz Khosrawi