Dear Daniel, Peter and Volkmar

Congratulations for this very interesting study! I very much like the approach of the study and think that you managed to come to several clear and important conclusions. Also thank you very much for your careful and detailed replies and revisions!

I am happy to accept your paper for publication in ACP subject to a few revisions (I call them technical to make the procedure as simple as possible). Please consider the following few points and decide whether you like to implement some further minor changes:

1) I am not so sure what an "updraft" is and it is not fully clear to me what you regard as an "updraft" in your study. I typically use this term only for deep convection, for the region with very strong, almost vertical ascent. It seems to me that in your study, "everything that ascends" (also in a dry simulation) is an "updraft". I don't say that this is wrong, but maybe you could better introduce and define how you use the term. It is notable that the term occurs for the first time in line 339 (discussion of Gutwoski et al. paper), then on line 417 (where you seem to define the term as air parcels lifted by 2.5 km in many days - which is clearly not convective) and then it kind of becomes the most frequent word on the final pages of the manuscript. Since you use the term so often in your conclusions, it deserves, I think, a better introduction / definition.

2) The term "warm conveyor belt" appears on line 412 for the first time without explanation and reference. How should the reader know in Fig. 9 where the WCB is? Maybe some more words here would be justified. As a side remark: the study by Peevey et al. is very fuzzy about the WCB-TIL link.

3) Line 421: is this passive tracer also affected by the parameterisation of convection, i.e., does it record the occurrence of convection in the model?

4) Line 143: unit should be K km-1 (check in other places)

5) Line 765: spelling of "Lagrangian"

Best regards,
Heini