Dear Dr. Lapointe,

thank you very much for responding to the on-line reviewer comments in this open review phase.
Both reviewers suggested some moderate revisions of the manuscript, which I deemed relatively straight forward to address in view of your responses. Therefore, I encourage to submit a revised version of the manuscript considering the reviewers suggestions.

Sincerely,

Eduardo Zorita

Dear Dr. Lapointe,

Thank you for revising your manuscript talking into consideration the reviewer’s suggestions. In my opinion, this version generally addresses all those comments, but I think there are still a few minor issues that require your attention (see below) I would appreciate if you could consider them as well in a final version of the manuscript.

I am looking forward to that version

Best regards

Eduardo Zorita

1) Reviewer #2 had some concerns regarding the abstract. I still feel that the abstract may mislead the reader, especially the opening sentences related to the ice-albedo feedback. The study does touch on this feedback but only marginally. Actually, the word albedo appears only in the abstract, which indicates that this is not a central topic of the study. I think it may mislead the reader along a wrong direction. Also, your study is not related to external forcings or to separating the influence of external and internal variability. It is rather a study on the link between the varved record with the PDO on long-time scales and an analysis of this record

2) The statistical significance of the interannual correlations is always indicates, but not of the correlations after time filtering. I am aware that this significance is harder to estimate due to to the built-in auto-correlation of the series. However, quite often the claim is made in the manuscript that correlations increase after time filtering. It would be very useful if the significance levels could be indicated also in these cases. Thy can be estimated by several approximate methods, either by calculating an equivalent number of degrees of freedom, or by Monte Carlo Simulations

3) I would suggest to careful reconsider the very last sentence of the manuscript (line 649). Future precipitation changes will be driven by several factors. This sentence refers to changes in regional atmospheric dynamics and possibly local evaporation from land, but one very important factor will be the increase in atmospheric humidity due to rising global temperatures and changes in the transport of this humidity by the large-scale circulation. So it is difficult to estimate the total change in precipitation - actually the agreement shown by climate models regarding future precipitation changes is generally rather poor.
But I also failed to see the significance of this sentence in the context of your study. If one is interested in estimating future precipitation changes in this area, one can just look directly at climate simulations, the very same that also predict changes in the PDO or in MSLP.

Dear Dr. Lapointe,

Thank you very much for revising your manuscript according to my final suggestions. I am now happy to recommend the publication of your manuscript in Climate of the Past .

Sincerely,

Eduardo Zorita