The authors describe in this paper the quality control of dropsonde and aircraft measurements, done in the STABLE experiment. Additionally, a brief overview about the scientific results of the measurements are given. Even if I miss only some details, I ask the authors to revise the paper in order to group by instruments. Now, a description of the instruments (subsections for aircraft and dropsondes) is followed by a section of the quality-processing, again with subsection for the aircraft and dropsondes. Next section is about data quality and statistics with subsections for the aircraft and dropsondes, where the dropsonde subsection has several subsubsections. I propose to have after the introduction a chapter with sections about the aircraft measurements, their post-processing and data quality and same for the dropsondes. I hope this avoids the frequent turn the pages while reading the article.

Another general point are the very long sentences. Sometimes, several thoughts are within one long sentence. I propose to split the long sentences and have one thought per sentence.

Comments line by line:

• Figure 1, 3^rd line: “Squares in (a)-(c) ….” -> I cannot see any square in the maps.
• Line 125: The accuracy is 2% for the relative humidity. Is it 2% of the current reading or +/-2% for all readings (2% accuracy and 50% relative air humidity can be 50+/-2% or 50+/-1%).
• Line 135: How are outliers defined? How are these corrected?
• Line 137: How was the correction of air pressure data done?
• Line 155: Is it an absolute or relative bias?
• Line 179: “…corresponding error was higher than…” -> How were these errors calculated?
• Line 183: How were the predefined limits defined? How were outliers defined? How were wild points defined?
• Lines 193/194: “…differed too much…” -> How much is too much?
• Section 4.1: I miss the quality-processing of the wind data.
• Lines 265-268: Why are aircraft measurements in the dropsonde section? Please move it to the aircraft section.
• Figures 6 & 7: Indicate, which distances correspond to sea ice and which to open water.

see attachment