Dear authors,

thank you very much for your responses to the comments of the two reviewers, which highlighted quite some critical issues of your manuscript. In particular the the question of whether your main conclusions are supported by a causal relationship or merely by a spurious correlation needs to be clarified and substantiated. From your response I understood that you propose to extend your analysis using CCM to address that problem, which, I agree, may be a feasible way.
I would thus be glad to receive a revised version of your manuscript which will be send out for a second round of reviews.
Best regards, Markus Hrachowitz

Dear authors,
both reviewers agree that the manuscript has been substantially improved and the results from the analysis now much better supports the interpretation/conclusions. Before publication I would nevertheless strongly encourage the authors to address the remaining reviewer comments. In particular, I would appreciate a short discussion on effect of temperature on the vegetation and its influence on the time lag as suggested by reviewer #2.
In addition, reviewer #1 raises the concern that the conclusions made still remain too strong and that they should either be further substantiated by additional data (e.g. wind directions) or toned down to some extend, also discussing potential alternative explanations and highlighting pitfalls in the given explanation.
Finally, CCM seems to be a robust tool to detect causality. It however remains a rather new concept, which may be unknown to many in the community. I would therefore suggest to add some more details about the method, including what exactly was done and what the results (e.g. the figures) show - as i see it, now an interpretation of the figures is given, but it is not fully clear how this interpretation was obtained (i.e. *what can actually be seen in the figures).

Looking forward to receiving a revised version of the manuscript!
best regards,
Markus Hrachowitz