Dear Authors,

Thank you very much for your paper on tropical cyclones in the north-western Pacific Ocean over the last 2000 years. I agree with the two referees that it is an important and valuable paper. You made a great effort to analyse these typhoon-related sources.

Nonetheless, some changes are necessary before publication. Please make the changes as the referees suggest and according to your own comments. Some of them are major changes. Therefore, I ask the referees for an evaluation of the new version of the paper.
In addition, I ask you for a few more changes:

1. Introduction: In the last paragraph of the introduction, only an overview of the subject of the paper appears, which is too short. Please add leading questions or precise information on the scope of the paper (in the abstract it is much clearer what you do).

2. Paleotyphoon records from China’s official historical documents: As referee 1 suggests, it would be very interesting to have more detailed information on the sources used in this paper, because they are so unique. Maybe you could add a bit more about the context in which the sources were produced and even give a translated example of a source record.

In my eyes, there is a chapter on the applied methods lacking, which should be added to the paper between chapters 2 and 3. Remove all information concerning the methods to this chapter (e.g. the first paragraphs from chapter 3.1).

Make sure that the content of the chapters follows the chapter structure. There is information on the sources, such as the lack of sources between 1270 and 1320 and between 1400 and 1450 in chapter 3.1.2. I recommend gathering all information on the historical records in chapter 2. This also concerns the information in chapter 4.1 on why sources disappeared.
Why is there no information between 1910 and 1945? I suppose there is a very good reason why you did not analyse this period – just mention it somewhere.

Minor remark:
You name the period between 1660 and 1680 as the Maunder Minimum (lines 233–234). This is not precise enough, because ‘Maunder Minimum’ is the name of a period from about 1645 until 1715. Rephrase this sentence.

Dear Authors,

Many thanks for the revised and considerably improved paper. There are only few minor changes suggested by the two referees, which I recommend implementing before the paper can be published. Many thanks to the referees for their comments and suggestions.

Yours,

Chantal

Dear authors,

Many thanks for your paper. I agree with the referees, that it is a strong paper and that it should be published. Regarding the structure of the sections 1, 2 and 3, there are still a few minor problems. Therefore, the paper needs last technical corrections before publication:
section 1. Introduction:
line 64: The sentence “However, … hundreds of years.” should be removed and inserted behind the next sentence in line 66 “Another … (Gil et al., 2006).”
section 2. Paleothyphoon records from China’s official historical documents
The first paragraph contains information, which belongs to the state of the art. This should be moved to the respective paragraph in section 1. The last sentence of this first paragraph “Therefore, we attempted … in historical records.” contains an information on the aim of the paper. This should be moved to the aims of the paper in line 73.
section 3. Applied method
The first paragraph until line 113 (“…220,000 recorded events.”) gives very valuable information on the nature of the sources. This should be rather inserted at the end of chapter 2.
Please check, if these suggestions fit for you.
I thank the referees for their reviews and of course I thank the authors for their effort.

Kind regards,

Chantal Camenisch