In order to convince readers that the chosen approach for measuring the key variable of the analysis temperatures is not a limiting factor the authors need to show that their main findings are robust

Thank you for your valuable feedback on our manuscript. We completely agree that demonstrating the robustness of our findings is crucial to establishing the reliability of our approach for measuring temperatures.

To address this concern, we have conducted additional analyses using an alternative measure of temperatures and have found that our main findings remain consistent. Specifically, we have used a measure of growing degree days (GDDs) as an alternative to the degree days (DDs) approach used in our original analysis. Our results show that even when using GDDs as the measure of temperatures, we still observe:

A. Heat around flowering has a stronger impact on yields than heat at other times in the growing season

B. Heat stress during flowering was responsible for a third of total yield loss from extreme GDDs in 1990–2012

C. The improved APSIM-maize predicted an 8.57% yield reduction across the Chinese Maize Belt as GDDs increased more than tripled at the end of the century (2070–2099) under a high emissions pathway (SSP585) in comparison with the baseline period (1990–2019).

Overall, we believe that these additional analyses provide strong evidence that our key findings are robust and not limited by our chosen approach for measuring temperatures. We have updated the manuscript to reflect these results and appreciate the opportunity to address this important issue