Dear I. Neugebauer,

Thank you for your response to the review comments, which were generally positive and supportive of publication in Climate of the Past.

I invite you to submit a final revised manuscript for acceptance subject to editorial review. However, i would encourage you to reconsider your discussion section, and in particular the speculative additions that might be made in light of the review comments. In particular, I would suggest that the discussion of 'phasing' of aridity/lake levels versus North Atlantic climate might be slightly confused in that 'in phase/anti-phase' behaviour has no clear meaning in this context, where we are comparing 'cold' with 'dry'. A cold North Atlantic coincides with either dry or wet conditions in the Levant, but why should one of these be seen as representing 'out of phase' behaviour? Furthermore, I wonder if there is perhaps some confusion between 'interstadials' in the terrestrial glacial-interglacial stratigraphy (lasting ~10,000 years, and being clearly linked to astronomical forcing) and interstadials of the Greenland event stratigraphy (which are truly millennial, and have no demonstrable link to insolation forcing per se). I would encourage you to include some 'constrained' speculation as suggested by the review comments (e.g. there may have been 'glacial/interglacial' or 'short/long term' regimes in Levantine hydroclimate variability, as driven by North Atlantic climate changes, which may have been activated by changes in ice sheet volume/height, affecting the response of Levantine hydroclimate to cold conditions in the North Atlantic etc...); however, please be careful in your description of these propositions and in your reference to terms like 'phasing', 'millennial' etc...

I look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Yours sincerely,
Luke Skinner

Dear Ina Neugebauer,

Thank you very much for your revised manuscript, which i think addresses all of the concerns raised by the reviewers (as well as my own suggestions), and which i am happy to accept for publication in Climate of the Past. It is an interesting and thought provoking paper, which i hope will attract due attention. I look forward to seeing it in press in Climate of the Past very soon.

All the very best,
luke