Dear Authors,

I have now read your revised manuscript and yours responses to the referees. The three referees were positive about your study and I think you addressed satisfyingly their comments.

I still have myself some minor, mostly technical, comments on your manuscript before it can be published. You will find them below. Thanks you for taking them into account carefully before uploading the final files for copy-editing.

Thanks a lot for choosing TC to publish your work.

Best regards,

Etienne Berthier


Editor’s comments:

P2. L13. You may further add here that the glaciers surveyed in the field tend to be located in sub-regions where the mass loss is greater than in the region as a whole (as shown by Figure 5 And Figure S10 in (Gardner et al., 2013))

P2L18. cap letter at the end of Vokso?

P2L20. "during"

P2. L31. "next few decades" a bit vague. Give the exact period over which a 10% area decrease is expected.

P2L34. space missing before "for"

P5 L13. A max slope of 45° is indicated here but L6 of the same page it is stated that pixels located on slopes > 30° are excluded. Unclear how the two slope threshold relates to each others. Clarify.

P5 L24. another impressive tools is the use of SAR coherence. Worth mentioning in this context (probably more powerful than InSAR velocity mapping): see for example (Frey et al., 2012)

P6 L15. remove "."

P9 L13. Provide the time span over which the net mass balance is modeled in this study.

P9L20 "insulating"

P11L12. add "elevation" between "covered" and "change"

P11 L21. Could you back up (maybe downplay?) the statement that "debris-covered glaciers tend to have large accumulation areas" with a reference or based on your data? In the Khumbu area for example, the large debris-covered Khumbu and Ngzompa glaciers have also very large accumulation areas. So the statement does not appear to be universal. Maybe tell this is true for your selection of glaciers not everywhere.

References for my comments

Frey, H., Paul, F. and Strozzi, T.: Compilation of a glacier inventory for the western Himalayas from satellite data: methods, challenges, and results, Remote Sensing of Environment, 124, 832–843, doi:10.1016/j.rse.2012.06.020, 2012.

Gardner, A. S., Moholdt, G., Cogley, J. G., Wouters, B., Arendt, A. A., Wahr, J., Berthier, E., Hock, R., Pfeffer, W. T., Kaser, G., Ligtenberg, S. R. M., Bolch, T., Sharp, M. J., Hagen, J. O., van den Broeke, M. R. and Paul, F.: A Reconciled Estimate of Glacier Contributions to Sea Level Rise: 2003 to 2009, Science, 340(6134), 852–857, doi:10.1126/science.1234532, 2013.