Dear Dr. Grieman,
Following the referees’ comments, I found that your manuscript needs a substantial revision. You and your co-authors are presenting valuable data but there are some arguments that need to be addressed before acceptance. Some of them has been raised by both reviewers and I need that you deal with all of them. I encourage you to submit a revised manuscript which will be sent again to the referees. The methods section needs some attentions and should be reorganized (see comments from Ref1 on methodological procedures but also from Ref2) and the back-trajectory analysis needs to be better explained. Also, the comparison with other proxies from the same ice core and/or from other records should be better considered, as well as a deeper discussion on the climatic influences.
Ref2 found that a discussion on the more recent variations and a comparison with historical records are missing. Moreover, a clarification on the limitation of this study and what is needed to go forward is also needed. What benefits vanillic acid provides when compared to other fire proxies?
The conclusions and the abstract should be revised accordingly.
Please, in your revision also add in the Data Availability section a proper data citation (with a DOI or a web link to the database) for all the data used in this study. These include both the new VA data set as well as the data from previous studies or from third parties that have been used for data interpretation and figures.

Dear Dr. Grieman,
The two nominated referees had no further comments on your revised version apart from few technical modifications, listed below.

Both referees found that all the identified issues have been reasonably addressed by the authors and the paper is now suitable for publication.

Small modifications asked by Referee 2
Pag 5, Line 1 - remove extra "that"

Modifications asked by Editor:
I would recommend that the authors change figure 1 adding the other Greenland and Arctic sites cited in the text.
Moreover, several times in the text, the authors are referring to millennial scale variability and I would suggest to change this. You are not looking at millennial scales in this paper.