Dear authors,

as you will see, the reviewers are satisfied with the revisions of the manuscript and they are positive about the merits of your work. Based on the recommendations by the reviewers and my own reading of the manuscript, I am happy to accept your manuscript for publication pending minor revisions (see reviewer comments).

Please address the comments provided by both reviewers. Besides several orthographic comments made by both reviewers, reviewer 2 raises two important points, namely regarding the use of a t-test for blocking events and the choice to only show SH results in the comparison of the aquaplanet simulations with reanalysis (Fig. 3), and he suggests to emphasize more the similarities between experiments along with the differences and to refer back to the questions posed in the introduction.

Feel free to contact me in case of any questions. Looking forward to receiving your revised manuscript and response.

Best regards,
Lukas Papritz

Dear authors,

thank you for submitting the revised version of your manuscript and detailed responses. I am satisfied with the revisions and I am pleased to accept your paper. Congratuations!

However, I do have some minor requests for technical corrections as listed at the end of this decision letter and I would like to ask you to incorporate them at your earliest convenience.

Best regards,
Lukas Papritz


Request for technical corrections:

L253ff. I think it would help the reader understanding why you choose a u-test if it would be stated explicitly that the gridpointwise blocking statistics approximately follows a Poisson distribution. This in particular concerning the distinction to normally distributed hemispheric blocking statistics.

L345: Delete «for the».

L502ff: It is not necessary to explicitly repeat the questions here, but rather just say that here you present the answers to the specific questions raised at the end of the introduction. Furthermore, it would help, if the question the subsequently listed results pertain to, would be higlighted. For instance, «There is an increase in block duration for blocks originating near mountains, though the statistics are not robust (Question 4).»

L544: «… than in the SH ..»

L545 – L549: The two sentences need rephrasing. In particular, it is not clear what «… , is exactly captured in our model» refers to. In addition, the subsequent sentence does not seem grammatically correct. Do you mean «…, there are some similarities between our aquaplanet and orographic configurations that are inconsistent with reanalysis...»?

L546: «Spatial distribution of blocking» is unclear, perhaps you mean «frequency of blocking»?

Caption Figure 3: remove references to rows, just stating «(a, e, i) ...» is enough.