Dear authors,

The referees were appreciative of the improvements brought to your revised manuscript and convinced by your answers. I am pleased to announce that, following their feedback, your paper is accepted for publication in The Cryosphere.

Please note that one of the referees points out a few last technical corrections that need to be addressed prior to sending your final version.

In addition, I also have a few minor suggestions to further improve the revised manuscript:

*p.2, l.2. The sentence starting with "Even for small mountain catchment..." is not very clear. Consider rewording as: "Even for small mountain catchments with areas of a few square kilometres, the spatial variability of the snow height and water equivalent is high due to a number of different processes: elevation gradient of snow fall, preferential deposition of precipitation induced by topographical effects, redistribution of snow by wind, sloughing and avalanching."

*p.8, l.17. The sentence "The trend surfaces are generated..." still seems a bit unclear to me. Consider rewording simply as: "The trend surfaces are defined by fitting a polynomial function to the sample points".


Best regards,
Guillaume Chambon / TC Topical Editor