Point-by-point reply to issues raised by reviewers and commentators C. Lemmen et al. November 27, 2017 We thank all reviewers and discussion participants for comments raised during the discussion period of our manuscript. Below, we address each of the issues raised. Short comment by Dr. J¨ ockel We stated in our manuscript that “a typical process coupling infrastructure like the .. MESSy .. so far includes mostly atmospheric processes”. Dr. J¨ ockel’s comment advises us that since the development cycle 2 of MESSy (J¨ ockel et al., 2010) they 1. ...do not longer distinguish between process and domain coupling from the technical perspective, but consider more the granularity on which model components are coupled Response: As Dr. J¨ ockel notes, this cycle 2 development is in line with our state- ment “The differentiation between domain and process coupling is not a technical necessity”; we now write “Vice versa, a typical process coupling infrastructure like the Modular Earth Submodel System (MESSy, J¨ ockel et al., 2005), which initially linked mostly atmospheric processes, has been generalized to support linking at a user-chosen granularity irrespective of the process versus domain dichotomy (e.g., Kerkweg and J¨ ockel, 2012).” 1 Anonymous Reviewer 1 1. The papers is well structured and clear but, in my view, it doesn’t fit GMD standards for publi- cation. In particular, the manuscript doesn’t include scientific results or evaluation of the model software – at least quantitative evaluation of the modelling performance. Response: We disagree. This manuscript meets the standards layed down for a Model description paper as outlined in the GMD manuscript types specification (https://www.geoscientific-model-development.net/about/manuscript types.html). In particular, we“describe model components and modules, as well as frameworks 1