The manuscript investigates the role of the 2018 SSW in S2S prediction of the "Wet Iberia and Dry Scandinavia" precipitation pattern by using observations and a new S2S forecasts project SNAPSI. Some of the conclusions are - the early nudged ensembles, unlike the early free ensembles, successfully capture the "Wet Iberia and Dry Scandinavia" precipitation pattern, suggesting that an accurate forecast of stratospheric variability is helpful to improve S2S predictability of precipitation. In addition, the SSW related precipitation anomaly accounts for about 1/4 of the observed precipitation anomaly, suggesting the importance of other tropospheric variability.

The manuscript covers an important topic in assessing and quantifying the contribution of SSW on the "Wet Iberia and Dry Scandinavia" pattern in 2018. It's also overall well-written. However, I have some major comments about assessing the role of tropospheric internal variability using ensemble spread.

Major comments:

1. About the role of tropospheric internal variability. While I understand that the majority of the analysis focuses on ensemble mean to extract the SSW-induced variability, I would suggest the authors examine more on the ensemble spread since the ensemble spread includes the tropospheric variability. Some of the questions that the authors could investigate include - Can some ensemble members capture the observed magnitude of the precipitation pattern? (This seems to be yes given Fig. 9 but the question is different from Section 7) What does the ensemble mean versus ensemble spread tell about the role of tropospheric variability? (The role of tropospheric variability is assessed in the paper by using the linear regression approach. Does the model simulations tell the same attribution?) What are the model-to-model differences? 

2. About 2018 SSW compared to other SSWs. I would suggest the authors add some conclusions/discussion on how 2018 SSW is compared to other SSWs. As shown in Fig. 7, 2018 SSW is not particularly strong based on T100 but the SLP_Atlantic is the strongest. This suggests that the 2018 SSW is not very different from other SSWs and the SLP_Atlantic and precipitation pattern is mostly driven by other tropospheric variability. This information is here and there in the paper but would be very useful information to include in Conclusions/Discussion.

3. This might be minor but why all the free running models predict a stratospheric cooling?