Dear Dr. Kennedy-Asser:

Thank you for submitting your manuscript entitled « Changes in the high latitude Southern Hemisphere through the Eocene-Oligocene Transition: a model-data comparison » to Climate of the Past.

Your manuscript has been read by two anonymous reviewers. While both reviewers recognize the importance of your work, they also ask for additional diagnostics and for more in depth description of the limitations of your models, specifically how do the biases in the modern impact your data-model comparison. Other points are the representation of zonal oceanic currents across gateways with low to mid resolution GCMs, the impact of the number of points on proxies records and the impact of the orbital parameters on the data-model comparison.

I agree with the reviewers that moderate revision may be sufficient to make the manuscript acceptable for publication in Climate of the Past. Hence, I encourage you to submit a suitably revised version of your manuscript taking into account as much as possible reviewer assessments (as you already did in your answers). If you decide to rewrite your manuscript and resubmit it to Climate of the Past, please outline in your Cover Letter how the new manuscript has been rewritten referring to where changes have been done and using annotated lines with red color for instance and providing the lines number. Include a point-by-point response to all referees comments. This will increase the speed at which I can validate your changes. I will probably send back the revised manuscript to one of the reviewers.

I look forward to receiving your revised manuscript. If you have any questions, please contact the editorial office at editorial@copernicus.org
.

Sincerely,

Yannick Donnadieu

Dear Authors,
The revised version provides answers to the comments of the two reviewers and is now publishable. The way you discussed all potential uncertainties is well balanced and underlines the need for more data before being able to firmly support one hypothesis compared to the others. It is also true that most of your conclusions about the cold biases at the highest latitudes rest on one single point but this is the state of the art at the moment and this worths to be published to warn the community about this fact. Please modify the Table 1 where a °C stands in place of ° (see FOAM resolution, 4.5 x 7.5)

Best Regards,
-- Yannick Donnadieu