Dear Authors,

While one of the reviewers is happy with the revisions of your manuscript, the other reviewer remains critical, with some valid concerns, as you can see in his review report. I look forward to receiving a revised manuscript in which you carefully address these remaining issues.

Sincerely,
Johan Meyers

Dear Authors,

As you can see, Reviewer 1 remains very critical with respect to your grid refinement study. I agree with the observation of the reviewer: a proper grid refinement should define coarse, medium and fine grid levels that at have a grid refinement factor (per direction) between levels of about 2 (maybe down to a factor 1,6 could work, so that you end up with an factor 4 in overall number of cells between levels, or 8 if you stick to a factor 2). I appreciate that such a grid refinement can become very expensive, but a grid coarsening, as also suggested by the reviewer, should be computationally feasible. I expect the result of this to lead to either of two outcomes: the "grid refinement error" is of same order as the differences caused by other set-up selections (e.g. shown in figures throughout the paper) or the "grid refinement error" is significantly smaller (so results are "grid converged"). Either outcome is acceptable as long as it is properly discussed in results and discussion sections. In the end, I believe that the strength of your work lies in trying to identify those signals that potentially dominate the simulation error when compared to experiments, but then that discussion should properly include all obvious signals (so also the grid spacing)
[Note that the reviewer, in his second review, suggested as an alternative to leave out the grid convergence study all together, and mention it as future work to be done, but I do not support that approach for acceptance of the manuscript.]

Sincerely,
Johan Meyers

Dear Authors,

Thank you for carefully incorporating the review comments. Your manuscript can now be accepted for publication.

Sincerely,
Johan Meyers

Dear authors,
Thanks for publishing with WES.
A few minor corrections:
1) In the references, Vasiljevic et al and Wagner et al are in WESD. Please refer to the final published paper in WES.
2) In the Koblitz reference, please refer also to the university where the thesis is published.
3) There are several titles of the papers where capitalisation is missing ("bolund"->"Bolund", "perdigao"->"Perdigao", ...., Use {B}olund in LaTeX).
4) Since you indicate that the extent of the recirculation zones is critical, I think it is worthwhile to refer to https://acp.copernicus.org/articles/19/2713/2019/ where these are measured under various stability conditions.
Sincerely,
Jakob Mann