Dear authors, 

Thank you for this outstanding piece of work, which I enjoyed reading and reviewing. Inevitably, in a report this long, there are some aspects that I would like revised, and hence the major corrections are a reflection of the volume of information in the report rather than its underlying value.

I have focused primarily on the human dimensions of fire & communication to non-academic audiences, in line with [what I hope are] my areas of expertise. 

All best

Ol Perkins

To whom it may concern,

This paper, the second in a proposed on-going series, details the collection, modelling and analysis of global fire occurrence and burned area data, and attempts to attribute outcomes to various causes including anthropogenic climate change amongst others. It is an enormously detailed and comprehensive article. However, perhaps related to, and a consequence of, the length of the document and the level of detail and comprehensiveness, it makes for extremely heavy reading.

There is a lot of repetition in many of the sections, possibly as a result of the very large number of co-authors. These could be streamlined and reduce the effort required on the part of the reader to read it. I think it would really benefit from a careful read-through and edit by the senior authors. One suggestion I would make to improve the readability of the paper, is to start with the rather excellent conclusion. This would provide the reader with an excellent detailed overview of the paper, which is what most readers would want to get out of reading the paper, and then allow them to dig into the detail and the methods if they desire.

I have identified a number of issues and made many suggestions for the authors to consider in their revisions (see attached).

regards

Andrew Sullivan

This is a fantastic community effort. Apologies for the delay in reviewing this, please see attached my comments, many of which relate to comments made by previous reviewers. Happy to review this again if needed and thank you for this great piece of work!