Dear Dr. Perez and co-authors,

I have finally gone though your responses to the referees, including the revised manuscript with the highlighted changes. I appreciate that you worked considerably on the manuscript and took into account the referees' comments by adding new text in all parts of the paper and by eliminating poorly substantiated content.

Given the substantial nature of the referee criticism on the initial version of the manuscript and of the changes you made in response, I will invite again some of the referees to get their assessment of your revisions.

I therefore invite you to officially submit your revised manuscript to CP. Before doing so, I encourage you to do three things:
- Spell out AMO at first use
- Have a proof read, in particular of the new text passages, where some oddities crept in, such as missing words. I recommend to do so for better clarity for the referees, even though there will be general language-editing by Copernicus after final acceptance.
- Reduce the (in my opinion) excessive use of "could" and "would" by using firmer formulations. Formulations as they are appear overly cautious and give the impression that you are not confident about your results or inferences.
- The discussion with Referee #3 mentions the 14C-reservoir ages with a reference to "general practice". However, I can't find any information on reservoir age in the manuscript. Unless I missed it, I suggest that you include that, even if just briefly.

Supplements:
- In addition, please provide the in-press manuscript of Perez et al. (upload in the "supplement" field).
- With regard to the discussion of the benefits of log-rations of XRF data, I encourage you to either prepare a plot of the rations on log-scale, as proposed by Referee #2, or provide the referees with access to the respective data.
- Likewise, you can provide a plot of the elemental raw data to Referee #3 for internal discussion or, preferentially, provide the referees access to the data (as you announced to do anyways for the public together with final publication).

Kind regards
Thorsten Kiefer

Dear Dr. Perez and co-authors,
Thank your for revising the manuscript substantially and also for taking on board my requests to fix up some details.
As announced before, I am now asking for another round of referee assessments.
Please also note that I have contacted the editor of the DEPR Springer volume where your associated article Perez et al. is in press. I hope we can find a way to get access to that manuscript somehow during the review process.
Kind regards
Thorsten Kiefer

Dear Dr. Perez and Co-authors

Two of the first round's referees have analysed your revised manuscript. Both acknowledge the substantial improvements and recommend publication after some minor revisions which are mostly of technical nature.

Therefore, I encourage you to revise the manuscript as you deem appropriate and, in parallel, respond to the referee points one by one. Most of them should be straightforward for you to address, but for two I would like to give you some guidance:

- Ref #3 points out that an analysis of the influence of AMO variability could be interesting. This is surely a generally useful discussion point, but I suggest that you do not add substantial new analysis to this manuscript that would require further reviewing.

- Ref #3 also suggests to add comparative records to the interpretative figure (presumably figure 3). Here, I agree that this could add substantial attractiveness to your paper. Therefore, I encourage you to consider expansion of the figure or, if you think that figure 3 is already too crowded, consider adding an additional synthesis figure.

I look forward to receiving your re-revised manuscript.
With kind regards
Thorsten Kiefer

Dear Dr. Perez and co-authors,

Thank your for carefully applying the suggestions of the referees in this last revision of the manuscript, in particular for adding an overview figure of regional records. I am therefore pleased to accept the paper for publication in Climate of the Past.

Thank you for choosing the special issue in Climate of the Past as the venue to publish your results and for being constructive throughout the review process.

I would also like to specifically thank the three referees for providing excellent and thorough reports. These are good examples of how fruitful a review process can be.

With best wishes,
Thorsten Kiefer