Dear authors,

Let me first apologize for the time it took me to reach a decision on your manuscript. I needed some time to make up my mind and decide on how to proceed.

Two colleagues have reviewed your manuscript and raised some serious concerns, one recommending rejection while the other recommending a major revision. These concerns address particularly the style of presentation, rather than substantial criticism on the science (although there are several technical comments on these as well). To address these concerns, the manuscript requires essentially a major rewrite. In such a case, the manuscript should go through an open discussion process again, which suggests that I should reject the manuscript with an encouragement to resubmit.

However, I decided for major revision, because I think that the science is, in principle, sound and interesting, and should result in a publishable paper. So I ask you to substantially improve the manuscript, particularly the presentation of the material. This is the way forward that you already described in your response. I suggest that for readability, you may also shift some of the more detailed information on the methodology into the Appendix.

Once you revised your manuscript, please also attach a version of the manuscript in which the changes are clearly marked, which will help the reviewers to identify the changes from the earlier version. I will then send out your manuscript for a re-review, hopefully by the same reviewers.

I am looking forward to your revised version of the manuscript.

Best regards,
Axel Kleidon

Dear authors,

One of the reviewers re-evaluated your revised manuscript and found it to be much improved, but still having some deficits.

Please revise your manuscript again, following the constructive points raised in the review and prepare a point-by-point response on how you addressed these points in the revision of your manuscript.

Once I receive your revision, I will send it out again to the reviewer for re-evaluation.

Thanks and kind regards,
Axel Kleidon

Dear authors,

Your manuscript has been re-evaluated by one of the previous reviewers. I am glad to see that the manuscript has been substantially improved, so that the reviewer suggests acceptance subject to a few, minor technical corrections.

The minor corrections suggested by the reviewer concern the figures:

(1) Figure 1, the right-hand sub-figure is blurry with almost all text characters unclear.

(2) I will also suggest unifying the font characteristics (e.g., the font weight is bold or not) between Figure 2 and Figure 3. Some text characters (e.g., the labels of X-axis and Y-axis as well as the legend) could be enlarged to make them clearer in both figures.

(3) Figure 5, the font size of lable in Y-axis label in the sub-figure describing PET could be enlarged to make them unified to other sub-figures.

It would be great if you can fix these issues when submitting the finalized material.

I am glad to see that, while this manuscript took a long time to evaluate and get to this point, we come to a happy ending!

Best regards,
Axel