Dear Dr Wang
Thank you for your detailed and insightful replies to the comments from the two reviewers. I now invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript, which will then go out for another round of review.

I would like you to put special emphasis on explaining the suggested link with ENSO/AMO a bit better. This is mentioned by reviewer #1, and I agree that the presentation of such links need to be further substantiated. I'm not fully convinced by the wavelet analyses providing evidence of such links, and would like to see an improved discussion, including e.g. a figure where the PDSI reconstruction is compared to ENSO and the AMO.

Also, please put some emphasis on comment 4 from reviewer#2, concerning the discrepancy between observed and reconstructed PDSI. You should not justify the biased reconstruction with the statement that "This phenomenon exists in many climate reconstructions".

Good luck with the revision
Hans

Dear authors
Thank you for the revision. Your responses to the reviewers comments are generally good, but reading through the manuscript there are quite a few issues that need to be addressed before the manuscript can be published. I have outlined my comments and suggestions below as well as indicated some in the attached pdf (commenting on the first few pages to show what is needed in the remaining text).

When you have returned the revised manuscript, I will decide if it should be sent out for another round of revision, or if I can make a final decision myself.

Comments on cp-2019-62

The language needs to be thoroughly revised. I have started making some changes in the attached pdf, but I don’t have the time to check the entire manuscript, and this must be done throughout. Maybe you should contact a language editing service with scientific competence?

Line 53 ff.: You should briefly describe the association between precipitation and large-scale atmospheric (ocean) circulation patterns in northern Pakistan and you need references using observations or climate models rather than proxy data to substantiate the claim.

Line 78 ff.: You need to provide some more information on dendroclimatological research in Pakistan as I’m sure that more has been done than Treydte et al. 2006 and Khan et al. 2019 (which is not in the reference list).

Line 87: How can tree-rings be used to forecasting future climate?

Line 108: The sampling site needs to be better described: elevation, aspect, stand density, ground vegetation etc.

Line 140: What do you mean by “All false one has been modified…”? Modified in what way? How many false rings were encountered (i.e. were they usual?)?

Line 187: Can you confirm that the EPS is calculated on trees rather than cores? Looking at the tree-ring width chronology, the variance changes considerably back in time. How can this be explained?

Line 213-216: Move to method part, not a result.

Line 263: I assume that you mean pointer years, and these actually include both the most narrow and wide rings. Thus, it would be good to show and discuss also very wet years.

Line 276: Good discussion, but It almost seems like there are two different chronologies that are combined, with large variance from 1900 until now, and much less before that. I think you need to consider this, and provide as much information on the tree-ring data as possible (see above), including if the trees were all living, if they were sampled at different elevations/environments etc. Does this agree with other drought reconstructions from central Eurasia?

It would be informative to compare the reconstructions mentioned in line 286 ff. to yours, as well as indicating the historical droughts mentioned in the text in a figure. I’m pretty sure that you would be able to get hold of those reconstructions.

It would make sense to have all discussion related to the drivers of droughts separated from the comparison between reconstructions. Thus, I suggest moving the sentence in line 293 as well as the short mention of volcanic influences (which could be expanded)

The paragraph regarding the comparison with the Treydte data is a bit confusing, both stating that there is a “strong consistency” and then providing several reasons for why the two records disagree. Maybe it will become a bit clearer if you turn either of the records as suggested above.

The discussion regarding the influence of ENSO is very confusing. What do you mean by “The spatial correlation exhibited the significant similarity of El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) in the region”? The whole section is very speculative, and why not compare the reconstruction with an ENSO record (or at least look into the possible association between droughts/pluvials and El Niño/La Niña years etc.?).

Also, while utilising climate explorer, you could see if there are any correlations between drought in N Pakistan and SST in the e.g. Niño 4 region (removing the trends first).

There indeed seems to be some connection with AMO, but it would be interesting to see if there are any connections to more close oceans, like the Indian Ocean or the Pacific (which you already hit on regarding ENSO).

I don’t understand the statement on Line 366: “Due to reconstruction indices, species, geographical differences and other reasons, it does not remain the same with the whole period.”?

Line 375: I would be very surprised if there is a consistent EPS>0.85 for only 5 trees throughout the chronology. This is not even achieved using MXD from extremely temperature sensitive trees from high latitudes.

Figure 3. It would be beneficial to include the EPS values in the figure

Figure 4. This figure is not very nice. Please increase the scale on the left figure (the * are outside the box) and refrain from using red/green colours in the right hand figure (difficult to read for colour blind persons). You also need to include information on which data you used and sources.

Figure 6. Why not reverse the Treydte data to make the two records more comparable?

Figure 9. Again, you need to cite the data you are using. In the AMO comparison, I suggest removing the trend in your reconstruction (this is done for the AMO). What is SAMS? Why compare with JJA-SAMS?

There is no reference to figure 9 in the text.

Dear Dr Wang
Thank you for the revised version. I'm happy that you have followed my suggestions when revising the manuscript, which reads very well now. Thus, I find it acceptable for publication.
Thank you for choosing Climate of the Past.
Regards
Hans