Dear Authors,

Thanks for posting your responses to the reviewers’ comments.

The reviewers raised substantial points but the suggestions included in your answers to take them into account appear reasonable to me at this stage (I have not checked the new version of the paper attached to one of your comments as the revised manuscript should be submitted separately). I would thus be happy to consider a revised version for publication in Climate of the Past. My only significant concern from your answers is the issue of the soil moisture. In particular, I do not understand your answer ‘We consider that this approach would reduce the consistency of the simulations, given that the moisture values considered by SPEEDY parametrizations would be still the climatological ones and not the ones produced by the CPC Leaky Bucket’. Does it mean that you are using a climatological soil moisture in Speedy? Would this imply that in SPEEDY the soil moisture is not consistent with interannual variations in precipitation? This would then be very instructive to test what would be the impact on your results of using the precipitation from SPEEDY to compute the soil moisture appplied in VS LITE.

Sincerely,

Hugues Goosse

Dear Authors,

Thanks for submitting the revised version of your manuscript. Both reviewers agreed that this revised version is significantly improved compared to the initial one but one reviewer considers that major changes are required, in particular because the text is still hard to follow. I agree with this evaluation and additional revisions following reviewers’ suggestions are thus required, in particular in order to improve the clarity of the text, before a potential publication in Climate of the Past.

Best regards,

Hugues Goosse

Dear Authors,

After reading your revised manuscript, I consider that it is much clearer now and, despite that some parts are still relatively difficult to follow, it can be published in Climate of the Past. I have made a few suggestions below. The text will also be copy-edited, as all the papers in CP, before publication.

Thanks again for submitting your work to CP.

Best regards

Hugues Goosse

Suggestions:
Abstract, Line 9-10: It is not clear to me to which result you refer to in the sentence: ‘the error reduction achieved by assimilating a pseudo-TRW chronologies is modulated by the strength of the yearly internal variability of the model’. Additionally, the word ‘strength’ does not seem appropriate in the sentence.
Page 1, Line 17. Please specify why ‘paleoclimate modeling ideas have been proposed’. The goal was to solve which problem?
Page 2, line 2 ‘as reference’. Did you mean ‘for additional references’ or ‘for a review’?
Page 2, line 9. Please specify at this stage what you mean by ‘beginning the off-line condition’.
Page 2, line 21. What do you mean by ‘in the realism of DA-based climate reconstructions’ ? Please rephrase
Page 2, line 24. ‘an online EnKF scheme’. If I am right, ‘on line’ has not been defined yet.
Page 2, line 28. ‘the both’, suppress ‘the’
Page 4, line 24. I would not use ‘aspect’ in this context.
Page 6, Eq. 14. tn and tau are not defined if I am right.
Page 10, line 22. ENSO is not an annular mode.
Page 11, line 14. ‘analysis is more evident in the RMSE maps’. I do not see what you refer to here.
Page 11, lines 24-26. ‘However, the use of VSL-Prod instead of VSL-Min appears beneficial to the filter performance for the analysis, as demonstrated in Figure 6b. The expected value of the RMSE shifts significantly toward lower values for VSL-Prod compared to the free ensemble run.’ I do not follow why you first compare VSL-Prod and VSL-Min in one sentence and then VSL-Prod and Free in the next one.
Page 12, Fig.9. Is figure 9 for the ‘non-cycling’ method? It is not clear from the caption.