Dear authors,

Thank you very much for your revisions. I have studied them and have one major problem left, which comes back in distinct parts of the manuscript and your changes. That is that your answers and changes are typically made in a very mathematical fashion. However, the reviewers and my problems lie with the practicality and readability for the target audience of our journal; geologists. I thus think you should make more sufficient changes to taylor the manuscript for the audience of Solid Earth, before publication of your manuscript is meaningful for all of us. I would thus like to ask you to make another, more thorough effort to make your manuscript clearer and more appealing for a wider audience - also beyond that of the reviewers - through providing context and practical implications.

I think this can be largely achieved by in a more real world, geological fashion answering to the questions of the reviewers. Examples include:

- Eric de Kemp: A considerable mathematical expose was done making the case for Baysian approach to developing priors for the distributions but this was hard to follow from a practical point of view. This section could use some more explanatory context such as when local or global priors are being estimated and how this is being done from the field point of view. Multi-observation sites to calculate local distributions? By regions?
- Editor: I do not see requested explanatory context nor answers to these questions, while I think they are relevant for our audience.
- Authors: The author’s agree that the manuscript is too abstract, some work was done in the introduction and discussion sections to make the topic more tangible in the geological world.
- Editor: I do not think this was done sufficiently. I see hardly anything in the introduction, while one example is added within the discussion.
- Both reviewers dispute the lengthy statistical explanations in section 3. Particularly sections 3.1 and 3.2 are perceived as unclear, so should be made more accessible for our less mathematically inclined audience. For our target audience it is better if you focus on geological applications than a lengthy statistical summary. Could you improve that more carefully?
- In the PDF you find more suggestions in response to in-line comments, which should help you make your manuscript more tractable for a wider, geological audience versus only for a statistical audience. But please also make an effort for the other points yourself. Improving the readability accordingly will improve the impact of your paper.

I look forward to receiving carefully executed revisions.

Best regards,

Ylona van Dinther

Dear Authors,

Thank you very much for your efforts to adapt the paper more to the audience targeted by Solid Earth. I think that will be received well and will increase your number of reads. I accept your manuscript as it is.

Kind regards,

Ylona van Dinther

Dear Authors,
based on the Topical Editor's report and my onwn assessment of the revised typescript, I am pleased to accept the manuscript for final publication on Solid Earth.

Many thanks for choosing Solid Earth to publish your research,

best regards,
federico rossetti.