Response to Referee comments for acp-2021-420 A climatology of tradewind cumulus cold pools and their link to mesoscale cloud organization

We present a climatology of trade cumulus cold pools and their associated meteorological perturbations :::::: changes :: in ::::::: surface ::::::: weather, :::::: vertical ::::::: velocity :::: and ::::::::: cloudiness based on more than ten years of in-situ and remote sensing data from the Barbados Cloud Observatory. Cold pools are identified by abrupt drops in surface temperature, and the mesoscale organization pattern is classified by a neural network algorithm based on GOES-16 ABI infrared images. We find cold pools to be ubiquitous in 5 the winter trades—they are present about 7.8% of the time and occur on 73% of days. Cold pools with stronger temperature drops (∆T ) are associated with deeper clouds, stronger precipitation, downdrafts and humidity drops, stronger wind gusts and updrafts at the onset of the ::: their : front, and larger cloud cover compared to weaker cold pools. The downdraft strength together with the cold-pool front duration explains 50% of the variabilityin : , ::::: which :::::: agrees :::: well ::::: with ::: the ::::::::: conceptual :::::: picture ::: of :::: cold ::::: pools. ::: The :::: rain ::::::: duration :: in ::: the ::::: front : is ::: the :::: best :::::::: predictor :: of ∆T ::: and ::::::: explains :::: 36% :: of ::: its ::::::::: variability. 10 The mesoscale organization pattern has a strong influence on the occurrence frequency of cold pools. Fish has the largest cold-pool fraction (12.8% of time), followed by Flowers and Gravel (9.9% and 7.2%), and lastly Sugar (1.6%). Fish cold pools are also significantly stronger and longer-lasting compared to the other patterns, while Gravel cold pools are associated with significantly stronger updrafts and deeper cloud-top height maxima. The daily ::: diel : cycle of the occurrence frequency of Gravel, Flowers, and Fish can explain a large fraction of the daily ::: diel cycle in the cold-pool occurrence, as well as the pronounced 15 extension of the daily ::: diel cycle of shallow convection into the early afternoon by cold pools. Overall, we find cold-pool periods to be 90% cloudier relative to the average winter trades. Also the wake of cold pools is characterized by above-average cloudiness, suggesting that mesoscale arcs enclosing broad clear-sky areas are an exception. A better understanding of how cold pools interact with and shape their environment could therefore be valuable to understand cloud cover variability in the