Dear Irina Statnaia and Alexey Karpechko,

thank you for submitting a carefully revised version of your manuscript. As you will see all three referees are overall happy with the changes.

Still they each have one or two further minor comments which would help further improving the accessibility of your study and therefore I ask you to address these prior to final publication.

Reviewer 1 noted the problem of using 1980-2010 as climatological reference for ERA-I rather than 1997-2017 as for the ensemble (l118-120 revised manuscript). You now show evidence that the results do not change qualitatively; at the same time some aspects appear clearer with a consistent climatological reference period (e.g. Fig. AC1 vs. Fig. 14). This might be due to a potential signal of climate change in particular at high latitudes. Therefore I suggest you follow the comment of R1 and use a consistent climatological record for ERA-I and ENS.
Reviewer 2 gives a good suggestion how to easily convince the reader of the chosen initial time with slightly more evidence rather than paper references, and Reviewer 3 notes that in the current version details are missing on the expression of the wave activity flux by Takaya and Nakamura. Please make sure to indicate all necessary technical details to facilitate reproducibility of your results!

Kind regards
Christian Grams