We thank the reviewer for considering our manuscript and for the positive points made.

On the specific points made:

We agree it will be useful to add a scale to figure 1.

We will add the % variation to the Carnegie curve where needed, and improve the figure further by including data from the other months. In fact, the original Carnegie data was reported in GMT, but using UTC, as suggested, is equivalent and widely understood.

We will add correlation coefficients and the probabilities of chance correlation. For the existing figure 2 these are (a) r=0.96 (p=0.0002) and for (b) r= 0.83 (p=0.03).

Our reason for using the December values is that, so far, only December values have been keyed from the Lerwick atmospheric electricity archive, and these values are readily available in the University of Reading data repository.

We will provide additional information on the PG, both by including a histogram and summarising the range of the values.

We appreciate the attention given to the paper and the insightful and helpful comments made.

Concerning the step change, the origin is unfortunately not known, nor is the precise use of the different sensors. We will mention the existence of the step change in the revised text because of its importance to analysis of the data.

In terms of the daily PG variation and the differences from the Carnegie curve, local meteorological factors can influence the values at different times of day. We have considered the possibility that the time synchronisation is inaccurate, but the decreases at the end of the day in both curves are exactly coincident, suggesting that this is not the explanation. Irregular sampling is another possibility, but use of the mean instead of the median, also does not resolve the question.

Clearly, a rather more extensive investigation is needed, but our object here is primarily to ensure the data is known and available to other researchers. We will seek in a revision to represent the diurnal variation more completely across all the months, whilst retaining the Carnegie curve for comparison. Our emphasis is intended on summarising the data and demonstrating its value rather than providing a full analysis.

The origin of the 1970s variations have been addressed in a recent paper, which was not published when the draft of this HGSSD manuscript was written. In this paper, (R.G. Harrison, K.A. Nicoll, M. Joshi, E. Hawkins, Empirical evidence for multidecadal scale Global Atmospheric Electric Circuit modulation by the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, Environ Res Lett 17, 124048, 2022 https://tinyurl.com/bdh9jehn ) it is shown that, in the interval concerned, the variations yielding the PG variations arise from the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, through its effect on modifying the global distribution of current-generating storms.

For the trend, there could be many sources, such as global circuit changes reduction in aerosol loading, or, as suggested, an instrumental effect. This was, to some extent, discussed in the 2004 paper, but unfortunately inconclusively.