This is relatively simple paper that describes a software tool to emulate EarthCARE or CloudSat measurements given ground-based, airborne, and simulated radar reflectivity and Doppler. I only have a few minor comments below to address before publication.

Line 73: ‘If the input radar data are from a 35 GHz radar system, then, the technique described in Protat et al. (2010) is used to convert them to 94 GHz’. This is important. Please describe the method at a high level at least.

Line 85: ‘As a result, the surface-up and spacedown view of strongly attenuating cloud and precipitation systems is very different and the comparison of these views using Orbital-Radar is not recommended.’ Are these columns flagged in the output?

Line 119: ‘Thus, a fixed value of 52 dB is used.’ Are you assuming sigma_0 = 52 dB or that the reflectivity factor is 52 dBZ? This is inconsistent wi the table.

Line 187: Bad grammar and duplicated sentence. ‘Finally, these two error terms are combined to estimate the total CPR Doppler velocity uncertainty These two terms are combined to provide the total CPR Doppler velocity uncertainty std(VDOP ):’

Line 204: ‘The MS flag calculation is based on the method from Battaglia’. Again it’s OK to cite but describe at a high level how this works.

I suggest that a table is added that lists all of the variables included in the output files.

The paper presents the open-source instrument simulator Orbital-Radar. The manuscript is well written. I only have few minor comments.

Comments:

Line 74: “the same dielectric constant (k = 0.75)” Do you mean |K|^2 ?

Line 84: “If the input data are from a ground-based radar system, they should be restricted to cases with limited attenuation such as ice clouds and shallow systems.” Embedded liquid layers could cause significant attenuation of W-band radar observations. Do you recommend to use MWR or lidar observations to diagnose mixed-phase conditions? Would you recommend a LWP threshold that would define where your tool should or should not be used?

Line 90 “the introduction of the Earth’s surface radar reflectivity” Radar reflectivty characterizes a volume target. I am not sure how surface radar reflectivity is defined.

Eq. 3: Do you have a reference for the EarthCARE’s CPR pulse shape?

Table 1. You assume PRF of 5000 Hz. What are the actual PRF values used by EarthCARE CPR?

Eq. 5. Is the reference (Kollias et al., 2022) correct? I was not able to find justification for using normally distributed reflectivity noise. As far as I remember i,q data follows normal distribution. The reflectivity factor should follow chi^2, if I am not mistaken. What are the units of Eq 5?