Dear Francisco and co-authors,

I have now evaluated your responses to reviews and suggest that in addition to modifying your initial version of the manuscript by addressing the reviewers' comments, you should consider including a discussion of other paleoclimate proxy data available in North America (e.g., PAGES 2k consortium, 2017) and how your new dataset can complement them when it comes to the validation of climate model reconstructions.

Good luck with the revisions. I look forward to seeing the new version of your manuscript.

Kind regards,

Irina

References:
PAGES 2k consortium (2017). A global multiproxy database for temperature reconstructions of the Common Era. Scientific Data, 4, 170088.

Dear authors,

From my point of view, you have addressed most of the reviewers' comments in a satisfactory way but there are still some issues that should be considered prior to the final publication. In the following I am referring to the page and line numbers in the reviewed manuscript with highlighted changes.

Page 5, lines 15-16: This sentence is somewhat misleading. I assume that you mean: Influences of long-term perturbations of the past surface energy budget outside of that temporal window may also affect the temperature in the employed depth range. Your current phrasing may suggest that you present methods for detection of such signals or at least some evidence of detected signals. Since this is not the case, I advise to rephrase this sentence.

Page 8, lines 17-20: It may be impractical indeed, but one needs to have at least an approximate estimate of the errors. There must be more measurements than from just one borehole that you examine in your response or some reference to add. If there is no such reference, I would expect that you would use the entire subset of existing measurements of thermal conductivity profiles to provide an estimate of potential errors, since your error estimate from a single measurement may be biased (by your choice of homogeneous values or insufficient heterogeneity in the thermal properties of the selected borehole). Hence, I suggest that you either include at least some estimates in the supplementary materials or outline why such analysis is technically too demanding.

Page 8, line 21-23: Although this sentence is certainly true, it calls for a supporting reference and a clarification of the amplitude of heterogeneity at play. In particular, to which extent may it affect your estimates when they are compared to the PIcontrol?

Finally, I spotted some typos/missing info throughout the manuscript (some examples below). Please, make sure that you have carefully copy-edited the manuscript before publication.
Page 2, line 28: “an useful” => “a useful”
Page 3, line 1: unite Gonzalez-Rouco et al., 2006, 2009.
Page 3, line 18: Add the link
Page 3, line 27: “surface temperature” => “surface temperatures”
Page 8, line 22: “extend” => “extent”
Page 9, line 27: Papers in preparation should not be cited.
Page 10, line 7: “captures” => “capture”

Please, contact me if you need any further clarifications. I look forward to receiving a revised version of your manuscript.

Kind regards,

Irina

Dear authors,

thank you for clarifying the remaining points I raised during the last round of review. With this I conclude that your manuscript is in a good shape and is suitable for publication.

Kind regards,

Irina