Dear Ziyue Li and co-authors,
Let me first offer my apologies for the delay with this final step in processing the manuscript. Other duties had completely taken me away from editorial work. I am pleased to accept your manuscript for ACP, subject to the - I hope simple - amendments listed below. I will not undertake a further review of these corrections but I would encourage you to look carefully at what you can do because my suggestions are designed to help readers grasp the significance of your work,
Sincerely,
Rob MacKenzie

In the abstract, I would like you to endeavour to be very explicit in distinguishing clusters of mass spectra versus clusters of molecules forming aerosol. I leave it to you to find the best language, but suggest ‘clusters of spectra’ and ‘aerosol particles’ are used throughout the abstract, for clarity. I realise this may seem heavy-handed, but I’m concerned especially for inexperienced researchers whose first language may not be English.

Line 86, please delete “a new clustering method” and change ‘a novel extension’ to ‘an extension’.

Line 116: please delete ‘novel’

Line 312: please delete ‘if any’ (I think the meaning is already captured in the parentheses immediately beforehand).

At the end of section 2.2, I would welcome a paragraph summarising the truly automated process and the part requiring human input (and when this input is for every experiment or just for every new kind of experiment). Please could you think about how you might convey an estimate of the time saved? Or is it not so much time saved as patterns found objectively? If that is the case, please say so.

Line 407ff. I think more is needed here about why it is better to look only at neighbours of the seed, rather than neighbours of the neighbours. Can elaborate your argument that NSSC is a development of DBScan and make sure it does not appear to be a simplification requiring quite a lot of data pre- and post-processing?