Dear Franklin Wolfe and co-authors,

thank you for the submission of the revised manusript and detailed replies to the comments of the reviewers. Based on the changes to the manuscript, I have refrained from asking for additional reviews.

Reading through the manuscript, however, raised a couple of questions that should be addressed before the manuscript is ready to be published. Please find these questions below together with a number of minor comments concerning wording.

With kind regards,
Wolfgang Schwanghart



25: "methods" instead of "a method"

32: remove "just"

33: remove "from a workstation"

33: Introduce the abbreviation LiDAR when first used.

49: "profiles" instead of "profile"

69: I suggest to combine section 2 and 3 into one section

82: Remove "which is commonly used by academic institutions" or provide a reference for this statement.

85: It is not clear to me, what "Step 1" is referring to. Consider providing a figure that shows the workflow

87: Please avoid references to the User Manual but rather state which spacing interval is appropriate when and why.

94: "To make it easier for the user...". Rephrase, e.g. "To facilitate visual interaction with the data...

97: I understand that MCSST only supports regression model of first-order polynomials. How does MCSST deal with more complicated surfaces, e.g. if the fault is located on a convex or concave slope? What about if the fault has experienced erosion? A diffusion-type process may lead to a more sigmoidal shape of the scarp. How sensitive is your model to this? Moreover, you could have also chosen a segmented (or broken-stick) regression model instead of three separate linear models. Please discuss.

99: How does this improve compared to your previous method? Consider removing this statement.

103: Please provide a different heading for this section (e.g. Visual interpretation and manual editing)

106: How do you decide what is a good fit? Is this purely visual interpretation or is the user guided by some metric of goodness-of-fit?

116: "commonly the case" is a bit unspecific

126: "simply": Please avoid subjective statements.

132: Is "bootstrapping" the right term here? It seems to me that the parameter PDFs are just randomly sampled. Bootstrapping refers to the sampling of observations with replacement. Moreover, are the parameters independent from each other? Or do you actually need to deal with a multivariate PDF? Moreover, the Monte-Carlo approach might eventually lead to a Bayesian approach to modelling the uncertainties and including prior knowledge about fault geometries. Did you consider such an approach?

140: What I don't understand is: How do you finally almagamate your results from the individual profiles (i.e., getting to the values in Line 186)? Is there such automated step?

153: horizon which is

162: "we can get a picture": rephrase "we can determine spatial patterns of ..."

165: attempted? or did you actually obtain data from as close ...

166: "This is one limitation of the MCSST". Remove this statement here and discuss it and the subsequent sentences in a short section (e.g. before the conclusions). If this is one limitation, what are the others?

185: Remove "we input"

Dear authors, I have now received and read your replies to my comments. Thanks for your detailed answers. I am pleased to accept your paper for publication in ESURF.
With kind regards, Wolfgang Schwanghart

Dear authors,

Many thanks for submitting your work to e-surf. I am pleased to confirm acceptance of your paper on the basis of the careful, thorough, and constructive reviews and diligent handling by the AE. All agree that the new tool you have developed will contribute to the research community's capacity for robust analysis of fault displacements.

I have a few additional suggestions that you may consider implementing before uploading your final manuscript files, or during the manuscript proof stage. These are detailed below. I leave it to you to decide when and how you want to address them.

Again, thank you very much for submitting your work to e-surf! I look forward to seeing it published!

Josh

p1, line 13: incomplete sentence here; better to say something like "coverage, ENABLING both regional fault..."
p2, line 49: missing word after "each" (probably should say "each profile"?)
p3, line 86: resolve, not resolves
p4, line 116: remove "a" before "knowledge"
p5, line 152: probably better to say "the best paleoseismic data sets in the world, the results from which we can compare"
p5, line 156: parentheses rather than square brackets around citations
Fig 4 caption: "blue arrow and rate represent" (not represents)
Fig 4 caption: I find the the wording "are shown in blue and across the transect in yellow" somewhat confusing

Also:
-- from what I could see, there is no reference to Fig. 1 in the main text; I think it would help readers to include this
-- I think it would help to define the parameters (m, b, x, hw, fw) in the caption of Fig. 1 (although these are standard and intuitive notation, it may be useful to have definitions)
-- either in the caption or legend for Fig 2a, it would help to specify that the light blue represents the topographic data (assuming that is correct)
-- I suspect that the text in Fig 4 will be too small once this figure is typeset; either increase the font size or at the least be extra attentive to this when reviewing the proofs

And finally, please note the following:
-- on the GitHub page where you host the code, you say that this is related to Wolfe et al. (2019); I suggest adding the full citation once it is available
-- the clickable link to the GNS geology dataset is not working (the URL is fine, but the line break in the PDF means that the link does not work); this is worth checking in the proofs