The study by Boateng et al explored the application of water isotope tracking enabled AGCMs to simulate climate and precipitation d18O responses to different uplift scenarios of the Alps with the goal to identify potential imprints in d18O that can be used to reconstruct paleo-elevations of this orogen. The manuscript is pretty easy to follow, and the results are straightforward and interesting. My main suggestion is that the analysis of the influences of different elevation scenarios of Alps on the modes of decadal pressure variability can be better linked to the precipitation and trajectory analysis. In geological archives, you will only see changes of the mean states of precipitation and d18O given the loose temporal resolution and signal averaging in records. If the decadal variability in pressure fields were to affect the mean state of precipitation and d18O, it needs to incur asymmetric responses of precipitation and/or moisture transport paths between positive, neutral, negative phases of those modes of variability. Alternatively, you could cut out this part of the analyses, which seemed to be independent from the rest of the analyses anyway.

More detailed suggestions:

1. Line 90, change “This” to “This event”.
2. Line 95, change “These” to “These processes”
3. Line 98, change “slab break-off is suggested to have occurred” to “it has been suggested that slab break-off occurred under...”
4. Line 99, “suggest” is used twice in a sentence, change to “argue”
5. Line 100, change “considers” to “focuses on”
6. Line 106, change “the eastern Alps initiated their” to “orographic development of eastern Alps initiated during the...”
7. Line 110 to 111, “Reconstruction for the central Alps” change to “Reconstruction of the central Alps paleo-elevation”
8. Line 136, remove “recent”. Some of the knowledge has been around for quite a while.
9. Line 142, please see Feng et al., (2016, EPSL) for the “Previous studies have used GCMs to perform topographic sensitivity experiments…” as well.
10. Line 165 to 170, how was the subgrid scale topographic variability treated in those topography sensitivity experiments?
11. Line 195 and Table 1, it is hard to visualize different scenarios of topographic evolution through time, it would be very helpful to turn this table into a topographic evolution diagram with respect to different time intervals.
12. Line 228, expand “statistical significance of these differences” into “statistical significance of these differences against simulated interannual climate variability”
13. Line 300, change “changes in the …” to “changes of d18Op in the…”
14. Line 340, “<80 mm/month”, how much precipitation is that?
15. Line 522 to 524, see Feng et al., (2016) for non-adiabatic temperature responses simulated in the Eocene North American Cordillera.
16. Line 625 to 626, it may worth mentioning that the configuration of paleo-Tethys would likely make a difference in whether there is “Mediterranean” moisture input or not.