Dear Dr. Meyer and co-authors,

Your manuscript had received two very constructive reviews, to which you have already replied in detail. Thank you for that. The referees agreed that the study is worth publishing, but requested changes that mostly refer to increased rigor of data presentation and record interpretation. I encourage you therefore to submit a revised manuscript version that addresses the reviewers’ requests as appropriate, similar to what you described in your response to the referees.

Main points that you may want to address in particular are:

Consistently, both referees agree that a more quantitatively rigorous approach to the chronology and the proxy data records is required to make the paper scientifically robust and the conclusions testable. You seem to have prepared major improvements on this point for the revised version of the manuscript.

The other major point of concern, related to the above issue of uncertainties, are statements about Atlantic-Pacific similarities and inferred teleconnections and mechanistic implications. It seems that you are planning to mainly substantiate the teleconnections by citing findings from other papers. Also, you seem to argue for a centennial accuracy of your age model. To assess these important points I may ask the referees again for their expert opinion whether they fee that the explanations and revisions are sufficient.

I do notice that you responded to Ref#2's question about the selection of records taken into consideration and their geographical distribution also simply by adding references. I wonder whether this will self-explain your reasoning or whether some formulated explanations wouldn't be more appropriate.

As a minor editorial point, I would ask you to consider minimising abbreviations in the text, especially local ones, such as BLB and AS.

Thank you for stating that you are making the data publicly available.

I look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.
Yours sincerely
Thorsten Kiefer

Dear Dr. Meyer and co-authors,

Thank you for revising the manuscript thoroughly with due consideration of the referee comments. I have read your responses and the revised manuscript and consider it ready for publication. There will remain questions about the timing and coherency of Kamchatka climate relative to the Atlantic, also about the interpretation of the temperature proxy. However, with the evidence well documented and described now, this paper will be a useful contribution to these discussions.

I am therefore happy to accept your revised paper for publication, subject to very small technical corrections that relate to the East Asian Trough: For readability, please don't abbreviate (not well known abbreviation and not often used in text anyways), and indicate its position in Fig. 4c as you did for the North Pacific High. I trust that you will do these small changes, thus will not check the manuscript again before it goes into production.

Thank you for publishing your research in Climate of the Past, and also a big thanks to the referees for providing their time and expertise for excellent reviewing work.

Yours sincerely
Thorsten Kiefer