Reply to Anonymous Referee #1

Abstract

We thank the reviewer for the very detailed and helpful comments. We have now revised our manuscript in light of these and the other review comments we have received. A pointwise reply is given below. General comments: C1 GMDD Interactive commentPrinter-friendly version Discussion paperThis paper documents the latest version of the ESMValTool v2.0. The paper and the tool have lots of very good points. For example, one can reproduce IPCC Working Group 1 figures fairly easily. As an IPCC author and also a user of the IPCC, this alone makes the tool very valuable to our community. The ability to quickly assess the new CMIP6 models is equally valuable and so on. I strongly support the development of the tool.That said, I found the paper very hard to read and review. The authors want to discuss each option (what they call recipes) found in the tool. In describing the recipe, it is good to show a figure or 2 to help the reader appreciate what the tool can do. Given the large number of recipes, this makes the paper very long with many figures. There is a tension between showing the figures as examples and trying to make certain scientific points/conclusion with those figures. I understand this tension well as I have also tried to produce papers like this one.Scientists want to talk about the science, not just use the figure as an example. The problem is the caveats and sometimes the complete justification for the conclusion is left out because the science is not the point. It is an example.In this paper, there are conclusion sentences in the figure captions and figure caption text in the main body in many, many places. Cleaning these up would greatly help the readability of the paper. As a reader, I strongly dislike conclusions in the figure caption. This is especially true when the conclusion is not restated in the main text. The technique of giving conclusions in the caption is fine in a talk, but not in a paper. It just adds to the length. Also, many figure captions are missing units and other details needed to document the figure. Sometimes these details are found in the text, but they belong C2