Dear Dr. Van Wijk and coauthors,

Many thanks for submitting your revised manuscript. I am pleased to see that you have responded robustly and in detail to all comments by the three reviewers.
I have given the manuscript a final read-through myself, and I have a few very minor technical comments, as listed below. I'm confident you will be able to make these corrections very quickly, so I am recommended that your manuscript is Published Subject To Technical Corrections.

Many thanks, and I wish you a good Christmas break.

All the best,
Stephen Hicks.


Minor technical comments

Line 28: Change "was increased" to "increased".

Line 35: Change "(a-)seismicity" to "seismic character".

Line 37: "Particle velocity" doesn't sound quite right. Maybe a reader might get confused with "particle motion". Please consider changing to "ground velocity".

Line 51: Change "Sunday" to "Sundays".

Line 60: It's fairly obvious to me, but here the "NZ" abbreviation is used for the first time, so it would be worth just saying ("New Zealand") in brackets after.

Line 62: "In a borehole near or in the CBD" sounds quite ambiguous. Better to say "in a borehole beneath the CBD"?

L91-92: Change "continues in the weekends" to "continued at the weekends".

Line 114-116: Are you able to generally comment on the approximate/relative magnitude of these events detected using template matching, and how that compares with the typical catalogue magnitude of completeness for earthquakes in the AVZ?

Line 134: Change "quite" to "quiet".

Line 140: Change "pandamic" to "pandemic".

Line 143: Change "Section B" to "Appendix B".

Line 137-146: I am wondering whether you could add a general sentence about what conditions might be needed to robustly identify whether the reduction of seismic noise in 2020 affected our detection of earthquakes? For example, we might need to look at a geographic region with a higher background seismicity rate than the AVZ? And/or maybe we need to study a larger region with a larger pre-lockdown catalogue of events? Such a sentence could also go in the Conclusions section.

Figure 1 caption: Change " (surface stations are inverted from the borehole station triangles)" to "(surface stations triangles point upwards; boreholes point downwards)" for clarity.

Dear authors, please include the corrections addressed by Stephen Hicks, and then the manuscript is ready for final publication. I'm looking forward seeing this published, Lotte Krawczyk.