Dear Dr. Hajra,

thank you for submitting your manuscript "Seasonal dependence of the Earth's radiation belt: new insight". As you may have realised from the referee report, the reviewer considers that your study has some original aspects and its therefore worth considering for publication in our journal. However, I agree with the reviewer that discussion of your methods and results could be further enhanced. On balance, I see very few references to results by the Van Allen Probes, (VAP) which show much more dynamics in the slot region and also the inner boundary of the outer belt. The review paper by Baker et al. 2018 on space weather is included but in a generic way in the first paragraph of the manuscript. Analysis of the inner belt is shown in Figure 2, but with little suspicion about its contamination by protons: VAP has shown that the spectrum there does not extend above 1.5 MeV (while the data shown in the manuscript are between 1.5 - 6 MeV) and part of the signal in older measurements may have been due to contamination. Also, several studies of the outer belt show a strongly energy dependent evolution of the electron distributions in the 1.5 to 6 MeV range - how much can the energy dependence contribute to your variability measurements?

Your effort to provide answers to the reviewer comments in the interactive discussion is nevertheless appreciated. To the extend these answers can be reviewed at an editorial level by myself, they seem sufficient for your manuscript to go into the next round of the peer review process.

I therefore encourage you to proceed with a submission of the revision along the lines of what you have already offered in the interactive discussion. You may use the same answers in addition to updating your manuscript accordingly for your formal revision submission, but of course you are free to make further changes if you consider this necessary. Please also consider my editorial comments before proceeding and include also a marked-up version of your revised manuscript where it is indicated which changes were made.

I expect that your manuscript will be sent back to the reviewer for a follow-up review.

Kind regards,

Elias Roussos