Thank you for your detailed response to the two reviews, and for the substantial revisions to the manuscript. I believe the paper is now suitable for acceptance, but on reading the revised manuscript, I noticed a few places where the text still is not as clear as it might be. Given that this paper will form the archived record for the weighting method for NCA4, some extra clarity is important, especially on how the weights are derived. Hence I would like to see the following (minor) revisions before publication:

49-51: "...ability of a model to project a certain change". It's not clear to me what this means. I assume you're talking about fitness-for-purpose here. E.g. a model's skill might vary for different regions of the world, or for different variables of interest. Please expand this sentence to make it clearer.

126: "...contains on the ..." A typo, I think?

139: should say "For each variable, v, ..."

144: "monthly climatology". But table 1 says "seasonal". Is there another aggregation step here? Or is one of these incorrect?

146-147: "area-weighted root mean square difference over the domain". This needs a little more explanation. Presumably, model output is gridded (but on different grids, depending on the model), and some (all?) of the observational data is gridded. I guess "area-weighted" suggests you've done something to handle the grid disparities. But I don't understand the steps involved in getting from the individual data points to an overall distance measure for each variable. Please elaborate (if only so that others could follow the same steps if they want to use the same analysis for other purposes).

147 "The matrix is then normalized". I think this should say "Each matrix...", or did I misunderstand? And is it normalized against the entire (inter-model) matrix mean, or just the mean distances of each model to the observations?

160: "The inter-model distance matrix is also computed from the inter-model distance matrix". This sentence doesn't make any sense.

202: The notation here is very awkward. Is it necessary to include the 20c superscript? You don't reference it anywhere in the text.

Figure 6: Please label the x axis.

386: "tailer" -> "tailor"

Many thanks for adding the fixes and clarifications to the manuscript.