The change tracked version of the manuscript contains many Chinese characters in the comments, which can be found in the right margin of the document. Would you please correct or remove those and resubmit the revision.

Dear Authors,
The reviewer had no further comments and recommended publication of the manuscript. However, I believe the manuscript still requires minor revision to address issues mainly in its writing. Below you may find few specific issues highlighted by the editor. I would encourage the authors to carefully check the manuscript and maybe have a professional language service to help improve the writing.

The title seems containing too much information. I would suggest the authors to simplify it to it to highlight the key information of the dataset. On the other hand, the dataset is about lakes, but title did not point it out.

Abstract, line 22-23. In 2018,.. the sentence is confusing. Please rephase it.

I would suggest remove the word lake when mentioning the regions to avoid confusion. For example, changing “lakes in the Tibetan-Qinghai Plateau lake region” to “lakes in the Tibetan-Qinghai Plateau region”.

I would suggest the authors replace “0-0.5 m” with “< 0.5 m” to be consistent with “> 4 m”.

Line 131. “delineating water body boundaries…” please confirm if it was to delineate the water body boundaries or simply classify water and non-water at the step?
Line 140, ”we mainly viewed the Landsat (5/7/8) and Google Earth images to confirm the changing region” the sentence is confusing.

Line 141, ”With respect to the small lakes with an area < 1km2 , we assumed that their boundaries didn’t change during the study period” How the small lakes boundaries was determined?

Line 153, ”We divided water bodies into lakes, reservoirs, and rivers according to their shoreline features, and also through referencing to the Global Reservoirs and Dams database (Lehner et al., 2011), Chinese Reservoirs and Dams database, and high-resolution images from Google Earth to tell rivers and reservoirs from water bodies.” Maybe the authors distinguished the lakes from reservoirs, and rivers mainly by visual interpretation?

Line 160, “one pixel buffer inward of water boundary was removed for lakes with an area ≤ 1 km², and two pixels for lakes with an area > 1 km²in order to avoid the influence of adjacent land on water bodies.” the numbers of pixels buffered in this study are not well enough explained.

Line 173-174. Please confirm if all of the Landsat data were processed with LEDAPS, especially the Landsat 8 OLI data. LEDAPS usually only applies to TM and ETM+.

Line 178, missed space between 1,301 and pairs.

Section 6.1 “Average and temporal trend in lakes SDD”. Correct “lakes” to “lake”. Also, please clarify what the average was applied to, spatially or temporally?

Section 6.2 “Lake SDDs versus different lake sizes in China”. I would suggest the authors to rephase the title. Or at least remove the word “different”.

Line 324, “total lake numbers” could be misleading, because the number is calculated from a group of subjects. Total number usually means another level of aggregation. For example, the total numbers of lakes in the regions is calculated as the number of lakes in all of the regions combined, instead of the number of lakes in a particular region. Please confirm and correct the expresses through the manuscript if it is needed.

Line 379, “… existed some errors”. Please rephase it to avoid ill expression. Also, change “validation model” to either “validation” or “model validation”.

Data avaliablity section. replace ".shp file" with "shapefile file".

Dear Authors,
I believe that the authors have made a great effort to address the comments. However, I am a little concerned with the updated title, which is the most critical piece of information of the paper. I don’t think dropping the word “annual” in the title was a wise move. I would like to ask the author to reconsider it before finalizing it for publication. In my opinion, the title could be something like

An annual inland water clarity dataset of China between 1984 and 2018
or
A Landsat derived annual inland water clarity dataset of China between 1984 and 2018

Please replace “shapefile file document” with “shapefile” in the Data availability section.

Also, small lakes are likely to be sensitive to changes in climate or human activities, and assuming static boundaries for small lakes may impact the accuracy of SDD simulation. I would suggest the authors add a sentence or two in the discussion to clarify whether the assumption could lead to uncertainty in the dataset.