CO Editor

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

While the authors properly adressed my minor comments, it seems to me that they ignored some of the major comments. See a short list below:

In my major comment #1 I asked the authors to formulate a clear scientific question of their paper. As far as I am concerned, this was neither done, nor did the authors argument against my case. It seems to me as if the authors mostly ignored my comment. Furthermore, to me a mere quantification of a variability without a scientific conclusion does not make a full scientific paper. This is a technical note, which could be published for example in a journal such as "Annales Geophysicae" which encourages such formats.

In reply to my major comment #3, the authors reformulated that their derived \pi \omega^{-1}$ is not the intrinsic frequency. If this is not the case, why not name it differently? By naming it \pi \omega^{-1}$ you imply that it is a frequency and most of the readers will believe it to be such. In fact in the caption of their Figure 6 the authors also name it as "the intrinsic period $(2 \pi \omega^{-1})$ a monochromat gravity wave with the given kinetic-to-potential GWED ratio would have".

In my major comment #6, I asked the authors to thoroughly investigate the effect of switching from one ECMWF run to another around 00 UTC. The authors replied to this with "we do not think that by using data of two different ECMWF runs per night the results might be corrupted". This is not a thorough investigation! At least some proof to back the authors statement is necessary here. As it is right now, it is mere speculation.
Furhermore the authors state concerning their methodology that "Probably all of these methods have their advantages and drawbacks, and it is simply not possible to take all of them into account in every study about gravity waves." While I agree with this statement, I still do not understand why the authors then hold on to a method for which it has been shown (Ehard et al., 2015) that it should not be used! The authors even state that "the approach applied in this study was the only one of the three approaches tested that allowed to quantify the underestimation of GWED in ECMWF data". If the nightly-mean method is the only method which yields this result, but it is known that it has major drawbacks, it makes me very suspicious, that what the authors show here is a mere artifact of their methodology.

Because these issues have not been adressed since the first submission of this paper, I recommend to reject the study in its current form.

RC1: ''Review'', Anonymous Referee #2, 23 Mar 2017

SC1: 'scientific significance', Andreas Dörnbrack, 13 May 2017
- AC2: 'reply to SC1', Jens Hildebrand, 26 Jun 2017
AC1: 'reply to RC1', Jens Hildebrand, 26 Jun 2017

RC2: 'Review of „Winds and temperature of the Arctic middle atmosphere during January measured by Doppler lidar“ by Hildebrand at al.', Anonymous Referee #1, 26 Apr 2017

AC3: 'reply to RC2', Jens Hildebrand, 26 Jun 2017

Interactive discussion

Peer-review completion