Dear Mr. Riechers and Dr. Boers,

I have attentively read the Reviewers comments on your manuscript and your responses. As highlighted by the two Reviewers, the focus of your revised manuscript should be less on the Methods and more on the scientific question you are trying to answer. The implications of your statistical results on the processes involved in DO events should also be discussed.

Your suggestion on how to restructure the manuscript could answer this concern. I thus invite you to submit a revised manuscript with a streamlined Method section (note that you can also add details on the Methods in an Appendix if needed), an extended statistical analysis on other proxy pairs and a discussion of your results in the context of DO events.
An additional (minor) point to consider would be changing the title so that it would better reflect your conclusion instead of the method used to reach the conclusion.

During submission of the revised manuscript, please include an updated point by point response to the reviewers, which should clearly reflect the changes made to the manuscript, as well as a manuscript with track changes.

All the best,

Laurie Menviel

Dear Dr. Riechers,

Thank you for submitting your revised manuscript, and for substantially improving it. The two reviewers have now evaluated your revised manuscript. They were both impressed by the significant improvement made. However, Reviewer 2 raises another issue with the Method used. They point out that you might be using a significance criteria that is too strict, thus leading to your conclusion of non-significant lag. They provide a detailed explanation and are willing to share their code with you (via myself), if that can be of help. Please carefully consider the point raised by Reviewer 2, assess the implications, and modify the manuscript as needed. Depending on your assessment of the issue, this will range from a discussion of the implications of the significance criteria on results and conclusion to a removal of the tests.
I look forward to receiving your revised manuscript and your point by point answer to the reviewers' comments.

Best regards,
Laurie Menviel

Dear Keno Riechers and Niklas Boers,

I have attentively read your answer to the reviewers' comments as well as your revised manuscript, and think you have addressed the reviewers' comments appropriately. I am thus happy to accept your manuscript for publication in Climate of the Past.

However, while reading your manuscript I have found a few imprecisions, grammatical errors, as well as typos. These are noted in the attached pdf. I would suggest you carefully amend the abstract, but also carefully read your revised manuscript after the suggested corrections are done to make sure it all makes sense.

Thank you for choosing Climate of the Past!
Best regards,
Laurie