Dear authors,

In my opinion, the revised version and responses have met most of the referee criticisms and recommendations. The paper is no doubt clearer now in many respects. However, I think there are two important issues that have been overlooked and were raised by Referee #1.

1) Chaotic attractors of periodically driven systems can be observed on stroboscopic maps taken with the period of the driving, on which the dynamics appears to be autonomous. For this reason, these atttractors are usually seen as "normal" attractors, i.e. not pullback attractors in classical texts. Since most of the paper deals with a periodically driven system, the question that arises naturally is whether we are really observing pullback attractors, as the Referee is clearly asking in his/her report. This is a question that would rise in most readers mind with some knowledge on the pullback attractors issue and may need to be clarified.

Therefore, I suggest the authors to discuss this point early on in their manuscript. I wonder whether a citation of the mathematical proof that a general class of driven systems, of which the model used here is an example, given in the Appendix of Pierini, S., Ghil, M., and Chekroun, M. D.: Exploring the pullback attractors of a low-order quasigeostrophic ocean model: the deterministic case, J. Climate, 29, 4185–4202, 2016 would help clarifying the issue.

2) Referee #1 report also mentions that the authors use ensembles instead of long time series, both methods are known to be equivalent in cases with constant or time-periodic driving. However, in Sec 5.2 a stochastically driven, so aperidically forced, system is briefly analyzed, presumably using the same ensembles technique. Some clarification is needed to whether the equivalence of both methods still holds, in my opinion. Is this true for any time-dependent forcing?

Therefore, I suggest the authors to deal with these questions in their resubmission.

PS: Please, correct the axes label of several figures where the text "Psi" instead of the Greek letter appears.