Dear authors
I agree with the reviewers on the fact that the paper is rather technical with not strong scientific or methodological advancements (a lot of re-implementations of existing and published tools, not real validations). At the same time I agree with the authors that this is an important paper in the context of the OzFlux Special Issue, because part of what this community did in the last years and for this reason I think that should be included.
My suggestion is to re-organize the paper as Technical note. Please note that the structure and content has specific requirements: “Technical notes report new developments, significant advances, and novel aspects of experimental and theoretical methods and techniques which are relevant for scientific investigations within the journal scope. Manuscripts of this type should be short (a few pages only). Highly detailed and specific technical information such as computer programme code or user manuals can be included as electronic supplements. The manuscript title must start with "Technical note:"” (see http://www.biogeosciences.net/about/manuscript_types.html). The paper by Isaac et al. submitted to the same Special Issue already includes some comparison of results (that I asked to improve) where DINGO is also evaluated, so this will cover part of the story and can be added as reference.
The comments made by the reviewers are relevant and the authors are invited to consider all of them preparing the new manuscript (taking into consideration that in a Technical note some of them are not any more valid).
I have also a specific question or issue (already raised by a reviewer but not yet clear): authors say that “'GPP is equated to zero at night but is not forced to zero during the day. Since GPP is the difference between measured net ecosystem exchange and estimate ecosystem respiration, it incorporates random error ……. While these estimates are therefore unphysical, the effect of their removal is to filter the positive domain of the random error distribution, thereby converting random error to systematic error.'”. I completely agree with the explanation but forcing GPP to zero nighttime is something that hidden this effect of the random errors in the EC data. For this reason it would be probably better to leave the positive and negative GPP in the night to better help a user to understand that there is an uncertainty in the data (and have a quantification).


ciao
Dario

Dear Jason

I think the paper now with the answers and modifications and submitted as technical note is ready for publication and doesn't need additional reviews form external reviewers. I have only one point where I don't agree but where I also can not say "change it": the GPP to zero nighttime. While I agree that it includes both random and systematic I think that forcing to zero is an error because one one side you remove this systematic error only nighttime (daytime is still there and you don't see it) but also because you mask a problem and for a user this is negative. If I get a DINGO result where a site has total nighttime GPP of 5 gC or -5 gC I will get the important information that there could be a bias in the data. If you force to 0 this info is lost...
I don't ask you to change the point before publication, only to think about this and then decide...
ciao
Dario

thanks, good explanation.