Thank you for the careful revisions based on the comments by the three referees. As you can see the referees provided follow-up comments based on the revised document. It is now my opinion that the manuscript is very close to being ready for acceptance, but a few points that the referees suggest remain. Please look into revising each of these reasonable suggestions before submitting a final version of the manuscript. In particular, each of the referees originally pointed out that the description of particle losses was insufficient. While this discussion has improved, Referee #2 points out a reasonable suggestion to provide a simple empirical calculation for the inlet line. Please also look to the other, relatively minor, remaining comments.

When you submit the final version of the manuscript, please also upload a version with changes tracked from the most recent version so that it can be reviewed for changes quickly and efficiently.

Authors,

After reviewing the second set of referee comments, I believe the paper is ready for publication. There are some grammar issues I saw while reading the paper today. Please change the errors listed below and do another proof-read to catch other typographical or grammar errors.

Best regards,

Alex Huffman

P3, L12: smaller diameters
P3, L20: not only dependent
P3, L29: the reactions don’t “happen from gaseous precursors”. The grammar here is a bit ambiguous, please revise.
P5, L5: Second sentence in a row starting with “this.” Can you be more specific at this important sentence?
P6, L8: Add “area” after surrounding
P6, L8: Add commas before and after “at most”
P7, L3: Is there a reason you use “Chl” instead of the chemical symbol “Cl”? Using the latter would be more consistent with the chemical nomenclature of the other ions.
P9, L11: Change to “There is a general consensus in the scientific community about the properties of black carbon”. Add period to end of sentence.
P11, L20: Setence grammar incorrect, e.g. “and its contribution over time … “
P13, L23: “the MARGA routinely measures”
P16, L3: “To properly determine”
P17, L3-4: “ammonium originates from”
P18, L13: The new clause is a fragment without a verb.
P18, 19: “shows a maximum concentration at night for nearly all individual periods and for the whole campaign”
P21, L33: “Note that the correlation coefficient”
P22, L13: Remove ‘partly’
P23, L3: “The investigation of pollution events showed that the majority of aerosol mass was contributed from secondary aerosols.”
P25, L4: Put commas before and after “based on diurnal patterns and a lack of correlation with wind direction”