The studies are aimed at investigating the characteristics of wind turbine in turbulent inflow conditions by simulating the experimentally measured flow field. While the studies are relevant for the community, I do feel the paper is not straightforward and tends to bring in some other focus to the readers, especially at the beginning of the discussion. I believe the main objective and focus shall be the effects of different inflow conditions, and the authors may remove most parts of the paper which do not support the discussion. In fact, extend the discussion of the turbine loads and response. Constraining the timeseries of the wind is an interesting approach which may be used to better understand the turbine behavior. I think a similar story was/is under investigations within the IEA Wind Task 47 consortium. Probably providing some more link toward similar studies/report will be of benefit for the audience. Last but not least, since the wind is constrained, I would expect some time domain comparison of the loads, not just the overall statistics (which can be achieved anyway without constraining in usual manner).

Dear Author, 

please, see the attached PDF document.

The paper assesses prediction capabilities of OpenFAST aeroelastic code through comparisons against detailed site measurements of the loads and performance characteristics of a GE wind turbine. The innovative element of the paper is that the authors apply data assimilation techniques with the aim to reconstruct as closely as possible the measured wind field which then serves as input in the aeroelastic analyses.

The work is novel and relevant to the wind community. The paper is well structured and well written. Furthermore, the work constitutes an enormous measurements and simulations effort by the authors. It attempts to provide answers to the open question of how closely the site specific environmental conditions can be replicated in aeroelastic analyses.

In the accompanying pdf the authors can find some specific comments. Below, the key points necessitating further attention or rebuttal are outlined:

• As mentioned in page 14, the advection time from the met tower to the turbine is completely omitted. It is claimed that this time ranges between 20-100s. However, 100s is not a negligible time interval. By doing so, all the benefits from assimilating the actual wind field are compromised. If there is a 100s shift between the simulated wind and the actual wind experienced by the turbine, then the analyzed loads and the resulting DELs correspond to totally different load time series which are only statistically equivalent as in the case of TurbSim simple. Could it be that the better agreement in this case by the assimilated inflow is because of the better representation of the spatial variation of the inflow? In the reviewer’s opinion at least the frozen turbulence approach could have been considered in order to mitigate this effect. This is one key point that deserves further discussion. Perhaps by comparing not only the simulated wind speed time series but also some representative load series.
• The authors claim that the overprediction in the flapwise moment DELs is due the induction modelling in openFAST which fails to correctly predict azimuthal variation of the induction at high shear exponent values. However, even at low shear exponent values the overprediction is substantial (~20%). Another point is that overprediction is equally high both at low and high wind speeds where induction is overall much lower (normally its variations will be lower too). An easy explanation could be that the overprediction is due to the omission of IPC. This viewpoint is refuted thought by the fact that deviation is independent of turbulence intensity. Finally, in the reviewer’s opinion this point remains not properly answered while some of the possible reasons claimed by the authors are not supported by results (e.g. not matching flapwise frequency). I would recommend some further elaboration on that matter or maybe some more concrete explanation (perhaps leveraging TurbSim simple results which seems to do better).