Dear Xiaohui Lin et al.,

Before taking a decision regarding your manuscript, I ask that you please address the editor's comments which were posted on December 24th. In particular, it's of concern that your comparison is for inventories which are not up-to-date, especially given the rapid changes that have occurred during the past decade in China due to the implementation of stringent policies.

I suggest that you make every effort to include more updated CH4 emissions in your comparison which would be of more value to the scientific community. For example, the CEDS global emissions inventory has been recently updated (https://github.com/JGCRI/CEDS/) to the year 2018. I suggest you contact the CEDS manager (Steve Smith) to ask if the CH4 emissions for China are available and could be included in your paper. In addition, you could consider including FAOSTAT emission estimates (http://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#data/EM) which go up to 2017. A discussion on the lack of recent data, and speculations as to why this is the case, would also be appropriate so that readers understand the limitations. Perhaps it would also be useful to contact the authors of the REAS inventory to enquire about why the CH4 emissions have not been updated.

Lastly, please make sure that your revised manuscript has be properly edited for grammatical errors and mispellings. I noticed several as I read through the revised manuscript.

Please let me know if you have any questions.

Best regards,

Nellie Elguindi