Dear authors,

Your paper was seen by 3 reviewers and all suggested minor revisions, the more extensive coming from reviewers 2 and 3. The points raised are appropriate and useful. On the whole your response and suggested revisions are suitable. Therefore, I encourage you to submit a revised version of the manuscript considering the reviewers suggestions.

In your reply to the comments of reviewer 2, you provided answers to their queries but did not specify if you would be including this information in your revised manuscript; I would urge you to include much of this in an abbreviated form. As requested, I think it is ok to keep L193-203 as it stands, but you could add Wary et al 2016 as a reference.

Reviewer 3 raised some very significant issues regarding the validity of dinocyst assemblage techniques to independantly reconstruct multiple oceanic parameters. Your revised version must address and include these. Your original manuscript did not present the reader with an adequate representation of the state of the literature on this topic, namely that the issue of autocorrelation for dinocyst assemblages has been heavily debated and certainly remains an issue, albeit one that is contentious amongst different communities. Examining the data presented in your orginal manuscript (fig 2), the changes in SST appear very similar to the inferred sea-ice changes in each core, and therefore this topic seems very relevant to your dataset. In your revised version, the issues raised by reviewer 3 need to be fully acknowledged and you should also include reviewer 3's suggested references and the inferred uncertainity on reconstructed parameters provided by those studies, in addition to your orginal error estimates. This will ensure that readers are fully informed on (and can research) this topic and reach their own conclusions regarding the robustness of your methodology.

In your response to reviewer 3's question about modelled surface layer depths, your answer suggested modelled depths of 150-750m were shallow enough to be deeper than the habitat of N. pachyderma, which may be as deep as 250m in the Nordic Seas. However, Simstich et al suggest 70-130m for the modern Nordic Seas influenced by cold Arctic water, which is lperhaps a closer analogue to your inferred stadial conditions. And also what about bulloides and quinqueloba which have much shallower depth? In essence, the modelled surface layers do not seem not fully compatible with your data; this is not detrimental, but worth noting.

Finally, some additional comments from my own reading of the manuscript:
In the introduction section you need to explicitly discuss the concept that previous foram based studies have inferred incursions of warm subsurface water during stadials (Dokken et al 2013 and Rasmussen et al 2004). As it stands, the introduction suggests foram based studies have only reconstructed cold conditions in the Nordic Seas; this is not the case.
Line 109 - please can you include any statistics to support this? I am not wholly convinced of this relationship, especially for MD95-2009 and -2010
Line 154 - your findings do not relate to the whole/wider Nordic Seas but are restricted to eastern coastal sites; please reword accordingly.

Thank you for submitting your interesting manuscript and I look forward to receiving the revised version, addressing the above points.

Yours sincerely,
David Thornalley

Thank you for your revised version of your manuscript, addressing the concerns of the reviewers and myself. I can recommend this for publication in its current form.