The four reviews received are mainly in favor of publication. Reviewer #4 is skeptical about the novelty of the work. I think the paper clearly points out that there are inter-annual correlations in resource data and that it has significant adverse consequences for the uncertainty on wind energy resource estimation. The data used in the analysis may not be ideal with most measurements at 10 m and broken records, but I think future papers will investigate the subject of the paper with other data sets (either modeling data or measured data at more wind energy relevant heights).

I think the paper is worthy of publication, but once you have incorporated all the responses to the reviewers in the paper I would like you to handle the concern by reviewer #4 by emphasizing in the abstract and the Discussion/Conclusion the novelty of this work relative to previous works.

Thanks for the careful response to the comments by the four reviewers.