We are very grateful to reviewer for reviewing our manuscript and giving valuable suggestions. Your suggestions will play an important role in improving the quality of our manuscript and inspire our future research.

We responded the comments with explaining our revisions point by point as follow.

1.   It is necessary to state what has been done by previous researches, e.g. Zhang & Demaree (2004), and the academic significance of this study.

We are grateful to the reviewer for this comment, which is very helpful in further clarifying the scientific significance of our study. 

The research of Zhang & Demaree (2004), including its preciousness and inspiration for our study, have been presented and analyzed in the introduction (see pp2 L51-58, in preprint). As mentioned, this study was critical and important, but its data were sporadic and early instrumental data. Their study was fortunate and fortuitous. The main advance of our study is to explore some feasible ways of analyzing the textual records of extreme heat events, while obtaining more information that have received less attention in previous studies from the records.

We are going to clarify our goal by reorganizing the language in section 1:

1) We will adjust the last sentence of the paragraph 3 to the 2nd sentence to make it more prominent, so that the purpose of our research can be clarified. (pp2, L49 & L42, in preprint)

2) “by means of textual analysis methods” will be added to the end of the first sentence of paragraph 5 to emphasize our differences in methodology with previous research. (pp2, L61, in preprint)

2.   Crop failures were more possibly caused by droughts and hot wind, rather than extreme heat.

We thank the reviewer for this comment, which have deepened our understanding of the agricultural disaster mechanisms of heat and drought. 

Since this study starts from the textual records, we have categorized and discussed the various impacts that appear in the text. Crop failure is a specific type of impact that can be identified separately and is therefore presented and further discussed. Human life and health impact are still the most dominant and serious, and are the focus of our attention.

Our main revisions in response to this comment are as follows:

1) In section 2.3.3 we will add the selection criteria of agricultural impacts records, and add an explanation of the mechanism of crop failure causation referred in the comment. The added text will be:

“It should be emphasized that only if the text clearly indicates that the crop is damaged by heat, it is counted as (2). However, crop failures were more possibly caused by droughts and hot wind. It is difficult to identify how much was influenced by temperature.”

(it will be added in pp7, L177, after the word “hunger”, in preprint)

2) In section 4.2.1 we are going to emphasize the nature of heat-caused disasters in the chain of impacts, which is crop damage caused by concurrency with droughts or dry and hot winds. 

The transmit chain 3) will be “Heat (combined with drought or wind) → Crop damage → Reduced food production → Hungry people/Rising food prices” (pp13, L272, in preprint).

3.   Is it possible to compare the heat wave in northern China with the historical records of other East Asian countries? It would be helpful to better understand the weather background of this event.

We thank the reviewer for this comment, which help us to better achieve the goals of the discussion in 4.3.

A discussion of the phenology evidence from Japan and China will be supplemented in section 4.3. However, it is a little pity that they only corroborated on long time scales that 1743 was at the beginning of a warm period. High-resolution weather evidence for other regions at the same time in 1743 is still lacking. This hinders our understanding of the causal mechanisms of high temperatures at shorter weather scales. These will also be explained in the text of section 4.3 .

Our supplement discussion is: 

More climatic records from East Asia also support this phenomenon. For example, climatic records from both Japan and Beijing indicate that the 1740s were the beginning of the warm period <sub>(Aono and Kazui, 2008; Liu and Fang, 2017; Aono and Nishitani, 2022). Unfortunately, it is difficult to find high-resolution weather records that are close to the study area and cover the year 1743. This has somewhat hindered our understanding of the mechanism of this extreme heat event.”

(Aono, Y. and Kazui, K.: Phenological data series of cherry tree flowering in Kyoto, Japan, and its application to reconstruction of springtime temperatures since the 9th century, 28(7): 905-914. http://dx.doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1002/joc.1594, 2008.

Aono, Y. and Nishitani, A.: Reconstruction of April temperatures in Kyoto, Japan, since the fifteenth century using the floral phenology of herbaceous peony and rabbit-ear iris, International Journal of Biometeorology, 66(5): 883-893. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00484-022-02245-x, 2022.

Liu, Y. and Fang, X.: Reconstruction of spring phenology and temperature in Beijing, China, from A.D. 1741 to 1832, 37(15): 5080-5088. http://dx.doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1002/joc.5145, 2017.)

(the text will be added to pp16, L351, the end of the paragraph, in preprint)</sub>

4.   In order to give a temporal scenario of historical heat wave of the study area, it is necessary to establish the chronologies of heat wave and precipitation, though it is understandable that the historical records about heat wave are not complete. A comparison of these two chronologies would be helpful to better understand the frequency and climate background of historical heat wave.

Thank you very much for your suggestion, which will be of great help to readers in understanding the context of climate change in North China during the historical period and in understanding the specificity of the case.

After consideration, we are going to add two sequences about study area in Fig. 1(a new figure can be found in the supplement), they are the sequence of number of extreme heat records, and, the drought and flood index (both are from 1500 to 1911 CE). A description of the climate change profile of the study area and the particularity of 1743 are also will be add to the text.

The added text would be: 

“As mentioned in the introduction, there are very few records (from local annals) of extreme heat events in the study area during the last 500 years, and the year 1743 is very prominent presence (Fig.1(c)). The drought and flood index sequence in the study area are also shown in comparison to give a temporal scenario of study area, and it can be seen that 1743 was a dry year in a relatively wet phase (Fig 1(c)).”

(the text will be added to pp3, L76, at the end of the paragraph, in preprint)

(We have re-uploaded the reply due to typographical mess in the previous one)

We are very grateful to reviewer for reviewing our manuscript and giving valuable suggestions. Your suggestions will play an important role in improving the quality of our manuscript and inspire our future research.

We responded the comments with explaining our revisions point by point as follow.

1.   It is necessary to state what has been done by previous researches, e.g. Zhang & Demaree (2004), and the academic significance of this study.

We are grateful to the reviewer for this comment, which is very helpful in further clarifying the scientific significance of our study. 

The research of Zhang & Demaree (2004), including its preciousness and inspiration for our study, have been presented and analyzed in the introduction (see pp2 L51-58, in preprint). As mentioned, this study was critical and important, but its data were sporadic and early instrumental data. Their study was fortunate and fortuitous. The main advance of our study is to explore some feasible ways of analyzing the textual records of extreme heat events, while obtaining more information that have received less attention in previous studies from the records.

We are still going to clarify our goal by reorganizing the language in section 1:

1) We will adjust the last sentence of the paragraph 3 to the 2nd sentence to make it more prominent, so that the purpose of our research can be clarified. (pp2, L49 & L42, in preprint)

2) “by means of textual analysis methods” will be added to the end of the first sentence of paragraph 5 to emphasize our differences in methodology with previous research. (pp2, L61, in preprint)

2.   Crop failures were more possibly caused by droughts and hot wind, rather than extreme heat.

We thank the reviewer for this comment, which have deepened our understanding of the agricultural disaster mechanisms of heat and drought.

Since this study starts from the textual records, we have categorized and discussed the various impacts that appear in the text. Crop failure is a specific type of impact that can be identified separately and is therefore presented and further discussed. Human life and health impact are still the most dominant and serious, and are the focus of our attention.

Our main revisions in response to this comment are as follows:

1) In section 2.3.3 we will add the selection criteria of agricultural impacts records, and add an explanation of the mechanism of crop failure causation referred in the comment. The added text will be:

“It should be emphasized that only if the text clearly indicates that the crop is damaged by heat, it is counted as (2). However, crop failures were more possibly caused by droughts and hot wind. It is difficult to identify how much was influenced by temperature.”

(it will be added in pp7, L177, after the word “hunger”, in preprint)

2) In section 4.2.1 we are going to emphasize the nature of heat-caused disasters in the chain of impacts, which is crop damage caused by concurrency with droughts or dry and hot winds. 

The transmit chain 3) will be “Heat (combined with drought or wind) → Crop damage → Reduced food production → Hungry people/Rising food prices” (pp13, L272, in preprint).

3.   Is it possible to compare the heat wave in northern China with the historical records of other East Asian countries? It would be helpful to better understand the weather background of this event.

We thank the reviewer for this comment, which help us to better achieve the goals of the discussion in 4.3.

A discussion of the phenology evidence from Japan and China will be supplemented in section 4.3. However, it is a little pity that they only corroborated on long time scales that 1743 was at the beginning of a warm period. High-resolution weather evidence for other regions at the same time in 1743 is still lacking. This hinders our understanding of the causal mechanisms of high temperatures at shorter weather scales. These will also be explained in the text of section 4.3 .

Our supplement discussion is: 

More climatic records from East Asia also support this phenomenon. For example, climatic records from both Japan and Beijing indicate that the 1740s were the beginning of the warm period (Aono and Kazui, 2008; Liu and Fang, 2017; Aono and Nishitani, 2022). Unfortunately, it is difficult to find high-resolution weather records that are close to the study area and cover the year 1743. This has somewhat hindered our understanding of the mechanism of this extreme heat event.”

(the text will be added to pp16, L351, the end of the paragraph, in preprint)

Added references：

Aono, Y. and Kazui, K.: Phenological data series of cherry tree flowering in Kyoto, Japan, and its application to reconstruction of springtime temperatures since the 9th century, 28(7): 905-914. http://dx.doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1002/joc.1594, 2008.

Aono, Y. and Nishitani, A.: Reconstruction of April temperatures in Kyoto, Japan, since the fifteenth century using the floral phenology of herbaceous peony and rabbit-ear iris, International Journal of Biometeorology, 66(5): 883-893. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00484-022-02245-x, 2022.

Liu, Y. and Fang, X.: Reconstruction of spring phenology and temperature in Beijing, China, from A.D. 1741 to 1832, 37(15): 5080-5088. http://dx.doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1002/joc.5145, 2017.)

4.   In order to give a temporal scenario of historical heat wave of the study area, it is necessary to establish the chronologies of heat wave and precipitation, though it is understandable that the historical records about heat wave are not complete. A comparison of these two chronologies would be helpful to better understand the frequency and climate background of historical heat wave.

Thank you very much for your suggestion, which will be of great help to readers in understanding the context of climate change in North China during the historical period and in understanding the specificity of the case.

After consideration, we are going to add two sequences about study area in Fig. 1(a new figure can be found in the supplement), they are the sequence of number of extreme heat records, and, the drought and flood index (both are from 1500 to 1911 CE). A description of the climate change profile of the study area and the particularity of 1743 are also will be add to the text.

The added text would be: 

“As mentioned in the introduction, there are very few records (from local annals) of extreme heat events in the study area during the last 500 years, and the year 1743 is very prominent presence (Fig.1(c)). The drought and flood index sequence in the study area are also shown in comparison to give a temporal scenario of study area, and it can be seen that 1743 was a dry year in a relatively wet phase (Fig 1(c)).”

(the text will be added to pp3, L76, at the end of the paragraph, in preprint)

Added references：

Hao, Z., Bai, M., Zheng, J., et al. (2022). Hydroclimate gridded dataset for eastern China during the last millennium (Version 1.0), World Data Center for Climate (WDCC) at DKRZ.https://doi.org/10.26050/WDCC/HydrocGDForEChinaTheLastMillV10

We are very grateful to the comments and suggestions. Your suggestions will play an important role in improving the quality of our manuscript and inspire our future research.

We responded the comments with explaining our revisions point by point as follow.

Major revisions: 

1. Section 2.2.1- The authors refer to a total of three types of data sources. Was this hot event not reported in other records? The reasons for choosing these three categories need to be explained. In addition, it appears from the results that Data 2 and Data 3 were only used to illustrate the progression of the heat. Data 3 provided only 2 records, which is a very small number and perhaps needs to be accounted for.

Thank you very much for your comment, which can help better explaining the data of the study.

We refer to the more commonly referenced documents or compilation on climate reconstruction in China during the Qing Dynasty. These three sources cover both local and central perspectives. 

R3 were staged submitted, so the records are less compared to the day-by-day record of R2. However, both R2 and R3 have more precise temporal properties and so have been used primarily in reconstructing progression of the heat. (has been mentioned in pp5, L117)

Our modifications are as follows.

1) in the first paragraph of 2.2.1 of the paper we will explain the choice of the three sources. The text:

“Three documents covered local and centralized perspectives, and Each of them has its own advantages.” 

(will be added to pp4, L83, in preprint) 

2) we will explain why R3 records are less. The text:

“Since R3 were staged submitted, there are fewer records about extreme heat compared to the day-by-day record of R2.”  

(will be added to pp5, L113, the end of the paragraph, in preprint)

2. Table 3 - How was the last column "Timescale of impact" obtained? This is not clearly described in the text. Correspondingly, how is Figure 4(e) plotted? This is a very important result. I think it is necessary for the authors to explain how it was converted from a textual record to a graph.

Thank you very much for your comment, which are helpful in refining our methodology.

We will add clarification in section 2.3.3. The text:

“We then counted the number of impact records that still existed for each month on a monthly basis. For example, impact records of population deaths, damage to facilities and animal injuries were counted up to the month in which they were recorded; impact records of crop failures were counted up to the month in which they were harvested; and economic and social impacts on this basis were counted up to the month in which they were expressed in the records.”

(will be added to pp7, Line 178, in preprint, behind the word “persist”)

3. 4.1.1 The authors give a demonstration of inferring temperatures from the coolness index. This is an interesting attempt. However, it is rather brief in discussing the limitations of textual records when it comes to physical quantification. A point to note is perhaps that body temperature is a composite perception of the environment and is influenced by factors other than temperature. There are also individual differences in body temperature between different people. This is not only limitation of the textual record.

Thank you very much for your suggestion, which helps to improve the rigor of our discussion.

We will provided additional clarification in our discussions. The text:

“Body temperature is also a composite perception of the environment and is influenced by factors other than temperature. This is not only limitation of the textual record.”

(will be added to pp13, L264, in preprint, at the end of the paragraph)

Minor Revision: 

4. P14，L298 - The meaning of "Tmax" needs to be explained.

Thanks for the reminder, we will explain it in the footnote.

Tmax refers to the maximum value of the daily maximum temperature in the month.

5. Table 5 - Abbreviations for the serial numbers of the headings is used, which is inconsistent with the other tables, so please note to revise.

Thank you for pointing out the errors in the manuscript, we will correct “Tab.5” to “Table.5”.

General comments

I liked this article for the meticulous search of information to characterize the severity and the regional extend of an intense heat wave that occurred in northern China almost 300 years in the past. I suggest to put in the title the location of the episode (northern China).

In my opinion the text needs some editing by someone fluent in English. I am not, but I realized that in some paragraphs the language is not correct or it is difficult to follow.

Thank you very much for your comments and suggestions, your generous advice will be of great help to us in improving our paper.

- The LOCATIO “in northern China“ has been added to our title.

- We also accept your comments on the English writing, and we promise to have the language touched up and polished by a specialized English person or institution after all the technical revisions are completed.

Lines 36 – 37: the phrase “there are few records” seems unfinished. Few records of what?

Thank you for the reminder that this sentence fails to convey the full semantics. We originally meant to show that records of heat waves are rare compared to droughts and cold winters. 

The entire sentence has been revised to: “Compared with 227 extreme droughts in North China during 137BC-2000 and 76 extreme cold winters in South China during 1500-1950, there are few records of heatwaves.”

Lines 75-76: “The annual average daily maximum temperature… in July is…” Eliminate annual.

Thank you for pointing out the repetition in the sentence.

The word ANNUAL has been removed in the new manuscript.

Line 86: “(Zhang 2004)”. It should be “Zhang and Demaree 2004)

Thank you for your careful review. Please allow me to explain properly. This is another reference, titled “The General Collection of Chinese Meteorological Records for the Third Millennium”, which you can see in the list of documents at the end of the article. This book is also the source of data for our study, so there is no problem with the citation here.

Line 106: Xiao et al 2012 is not in the References

We are appreciated of your review and reminders. 

This missing reference has been added to the list of references.

Line 121: Explain what is Yu-Fen-Cun

Line 200: Explain what is Yu-Xue-Fen-Cun

Thank you for your suggestions, which helps the reader to understand the paper better.

The explanation has been added to a footnote at the bottom of the page: Yu-Xue-Fen-Cun is a kind of agricultural weather record from Qing dynasty archives, which recorded the depth of infiltration after each precipitation (Yu-Fen-Cun) and the snow depth (Xue-Fen-Cun). It can be obtained from the First Historical Archives of China. The system description and applications of Yu-Xue-Fen-Cun can also be found in Ge et al, 2005.

Line 276: Fang et al. 2015 ia nor in the References

Line 328: Gasparrini et al. 2015 is not in the References

Line 329: Cheng et al. 2019 is not in the References

Line 359: The four citations in this line are not in the References

We appreciate your careful review and reminder. It is possible that the manuscript was in the process of revision and the literature management software did not perform a good link migration. We regret and apologize for my oversight and for the review obstacle it caused.

After verification, we have added the above missing sources (8 in total) to the reference list.

Line 359 – 360: “Because they often occur at the same time as westerlies fluctuate more.” This phrase needs a better explanation.

Thank you for your review and suggestions, which can well help us to enhance the logic and readability of the paper. We agree that some of the textual expressions in 4.3 do not express the intention of our discussion well.

We deleted the statements L358-L361(in preprint), and deleted the first two sentences L335-L337 of 4.3. And we added a new paragraph: In this section, we would like to discuss whether the extreme heat of 1743 is remotely related to other regions by comparing proxy data from multiple regions, and whether they share similar climatic mechanisms or contexts with modern heat events. Modern studies on heat wave mechanisms reveal that extreme heat events in northern China and North America or Europe are often synchronized. The reason behind this is that westerly wind belt fluctuations in the Northern Hemisphere generate multiple cut-off low and high pressures, and high-pressure ridges are often formed on the continents, thus causing synchronized high temperatures on different continents. For example, in the summer of 2022, very intense and extreme heat occurred simultaneously in northern China and Europe. These studies also point out that global warming has caused the westerly wind belt to move northward and become narrower, and it is more likely that multiple high-pressure ridges will be formed across the continents, which may be the cause of the current high temperature extremes in the Northern Hemisphere. be the reason for the current frequency of extreme heat in the northern hemisphere (Deng et al. 2018; Kornhuber et al. 2019; Kornhuber et al. 2020; Yang et al. 2021). We believe that such modifications would better introduce and clarify the purpose of this part of the discussion. 

Line 362 – 363: “It is also unclear whether the fluctuations of the westerlies…” N-S fluctuations? fluctuations in intensity? This whole paragraph (lines 358 – 366) needs a better explanation. What is the link between the westerlies and the heat waves in China?

Thank you very much for your comment. We think this issue will also be better resolved with the modification above.

Lines 370 - 371: “in mining the climate eigenvalues” I don’t understand the meaning of this.

Thank you very much for your reminder, which is very helpful for us to improve our expression and summarize our research content. The meaning of the phrases you mentioned is: using the description of the text to do some further information mining, as done in 4.1.1, to infer some meteorological feature values. At the same time, we found the advantages and disadvantages of textual records. However, we also realized that discussing the strengths and weaknesses of the textual record was not our original intent. After reviewing the text, we believe that this sentence in the current conclusion does not summarize the discussion in section 4.1 well. 

The sentence has been revised to be: “We further inferred the range of extreme temperatures based on textual information and analyzed the chain of transmission of impacts.” This seems to summarize what we've done more directly and ties in better with the conclusion.

Table 5. 2003 France 15 days: 8.4 – 8.15. These are 12 days, not 15 days.

Thank you very much for your careful review and kind reminder. 

We have checked the source paper and found that the date range of 8.4-8.18 was wrongly noted as 8.15. The total of 15 days is correct. We have corrected this.

References

Some of articles of the same principal author are not sorted by the year of publication (Brazdil et al.; Ge et al; Heeter et al, Wang et al, Wilson et al.

In the reference of Udías 1994, the name of the journal is missing.

Thank you again for your careful review and generous reminder. 

We have reorganized it by year and added the missing information. We have also rechecked the references section and corrected any errors.