Dear Dr. Kovtyukh,

thank you for submitting your manuscript "Distribution of the Earth's radiation belts protons over the drift frequency of particles" to An. Geoph. As you may have realised from the two referee reports, available also in the interactive discussion, the two reviewers find your work of importance and appropriate for publication in our journal. They still, however, remark that there are numerous (minor) presentation issues that need to be resolved before we can proceed with the next stages of peer review. I appreciate your effort in providing already some insights on how these issues would be tackled (interactive discussion).

From an editorial perspective, I would still need to see some more discussion on how data have been treated as well as more extensive references to earlier work, such that the originality of your methods and results can be highlighted. For example:

1) How did you perform the averaging of the datasets from different instruments, given that many have different detector characteristics and there may be cross-calibration issues? Did you use a different weight for different instruments that may obtain higher quality spectra? Are all solar cycle phases covered with the same frequency, or do certain solar cycle phases dominate in the averaging? How do you define "quiet periods", is there a source/reference of your data (rather just saying "data from Van Allen Probes"). Some of this information is partly in your companion paper, but some more details would be useful here for the completeness of the work.
2) How representative is the averaging for high L-shells? Is there an impact due to the fact that you use a dipole L instead of an L*?
3) Several papers by Selesnick et al. and others are referenced but barely discussed, e.g. aspects of solar energetic particle entry etc.). Its difficult to see how the methodology introduced in this paer offers advantages in the interpretation of data compared to what has been done so far.

I recommend that you prepare and formally submit your revised article along with a point-by-point answer to all the reviewer/editorial comments and a version of your revision with all changes marked-up. You may reuse the answers and material you already provided in the interactive discussion, but if you find that additional changes or clarifications are needed, feel free to include them. Your revision will likely be reviewed only by myself, unless, based on the quality of the revised article, I find it necessary to resend it for at least one more round of reviews.

Kind regards,

Elias Roussos