Dear Dr Seftigen,

Thank you for your responses to the two referee comments and the short comment. I appreciate your proposals to address the comments and accordingly, I invite you to submit a revised manuscript.

Regarding your request for clarification on the referee #1 comment:
"Sec./Fig. S1: I’m a bit lost here. How can the annual mean be overestimated if all monthly
means are underestimated?"
All that is required is to clarify that the data in Fig. S1b are from southern Scandinavia (not stated in the caption or text as far as I can tell).

In addition, in response to Referee #2's point 1., I encourage you to consider adding to the methods the more specific context your provide in your response (text could be inserted around the callout for Figure S3). Although the use of TRW to moisture balance is discussed in general terms in the introduction the additional text in the methods will assist readers to recognise the importance of the data presented in Figures S3 and S6.

I look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Best wishes, Helen
______________________________________________________
Dr Helen McGregor
School of Earth & Environmental Sciences
University of Wollongong Australia

Dear Dr Seftigen,

Thank you for your revised manuscript and I am pleased to accept your paper for publication subject to technical corrections.

Technical corrections to the Data Availability section are required:

1. Please insert the NOAA paleoclimate data URL for the ScandT14 temperature reconstruction into the Data Availability section.

2. As far as I can see the ScandH17 reconstruction and standardized tree-ring chronologies (new and reporcessed) are not in the supplementary material. ScandH17 and the standardized tree-ring chronologies need to be archived and available. I recommend this be done with the NOAA paleoclimate database. As for point 1) above the URL can be inserted in the Data Availability section.

3. I am not satisfied that the Seftigen et al. 2015 data, updated or otherwise, have been publicly archived. Table II refers to datasets 'Updated by Seftigen et al. 2015' or 'Seftigen et al. 2015'. I tracked back to Seftigen et al. 2015 to look at these data -- note the correct doi is 10.1175/JCLI-D-13-00734.1 (dash missing in the citation in the References section) -- and the supplementary material associated with Seftigen et al. 2015 only contains tree ring location information. Please comply with the 2k Special Issue Data Review team request "(2) Add Data Citations or URLs (in addition to publication citations) for each of the 27[25] tree ring chronologies used in this study to Table II (we note that Table II includes only 25 entires). For those raw data not already in a persistent public repository, submit the essential metadata along with the chronology itself and add the corresponding Data Citation (or URL) in Table II. The archived data must contain the modified chronologies as they were re-processed and used in this study (newest signal-free standardization; adjusted to reduce variance bias). The ‘Updated by Seftigen et al. 2015’ revisions should be publicly archived and the ’Seftigen et al. 2015’ datasets should also be archived."

Once these technical corrections are addressed I will give your paper my highest priority towards accepting it for final publication.

Best wishes, Helen
______________________________________________________
Associate Professor Helen McGregor
School of Earth & Environmental Sciences 
University of Wollongong Australia