Dear author,

Thank you for having reacted positively to the reviewers comments. I understand that you have already prepared a substantially revised version of your manuscript. You are therefore kindly invited to submit this revised version which is likely to be sent to the reviewers for further advice.

Most sincerely,

M. Crucifix.

Dear authors,

Your article was sent to the two reviewers who originally commented it. I got a reply from reviewer #1, and it seems that I will not hear from reviewer #2 before another few weeks, so I take the decision to stop the review process here.

As you will see, reviewer #1 is still very critical about the validation procedure. (S)he is pointing to what (s)he considers as significant inconsistencies in the validation framework.
Besides the discussion about whether or not the parameters of the SEMIC should be re-adjusted (I think the reviewer would be happy you just to mention caveats of this choice), a wider concern is a possible mis-interpretation of what historic runs actually are. Historic runs are not reanalyses. The anomalies in the year 1990 (compared to the climatological average) in HadGEM has no reason to correspond to the anomalies of year 1990 in RACMO (driven by reanalyses). This poses serious concerns as to the meaning and interpretation of Figures 4 and 5. I share this concern.

Dear author,

Based on the reviewer report you have successfully addressed the scientific issues raised in this paper. I therefore propose you to examine the remaining editorial suggestions before we proceed to the publication of your article. Thank you for your patience and for your contribution.

Further suggestions below:

"Due to the fact, " (p. 6 and p. 11). It is the first time I see a comma after fact. In both cases the sentence can be made lighter. E.g., p. 11: "As the inversion technique applied to for computing the friction coefficient ... ".
In the text: many instances, if not all, of "in order to" can be replaced by "to"

The copy-editor will certainly provide further suggestions, but please read again your text while thinking about ways to write simpler or lighter sentences.

Figure 2, legend "The gray line depicts the identity." -> "The gray line is the identity (or the identity function)"
Figure 4, legend: gray color : do you mean "gray shade" ?

Dear Authors,

Congratulations. Thank you for having thoroughly addressed the comments of the reviewer. The paper will now undergo some in-depth copy-editing, and you will be contacted to this end by the Copernicus editorial offices.

michel.