Dear authors,

Thank you for submitting a revised version of the article along with detailed replies to the authors comments. I will send the ms for further review to the reviewers, but before this I'm asking you to perform a few changes to the manuscript, which I hope will improve it and make the further review smoother.

Here are the changes requested:

- The new structure of the manuscript seems more appropriate and corresponds to the recommendations of the reviewers. However I'm asking you to remove from Section 2. any material which corresponds to "results", "conclusions" or "implications" of the intercomparison. This applies in particular to the following statement :
* Page 6, line 19 : "The instruments performed in a reliable manner exhibiting a measurement rate higher than 95 % at both sites over the course of the two winter seasons. No malfunctions were noted and no maintenance was required." This is a result, not an instrument description.
* Page 8, line 4 : "The instruments at both sites worked in a reliable manner during the accumulation periods but the instrument at Sodankylӓ malfunctioned due to water damage to the electronics late in the spring of 2014 and again early spring of 2015. At Weissfluhjoch, 99% of the 1‐minute data for both years are usable for intercomparison while 83 % and 67 % of the 1‐minute data are usable for the concurrent intercomparison periods at Sodankylӓ. Other than this, no malfunctions were reported or maintenance required during the intercomparison." This is a result, not an instrument description.
* Page 8, line 10 : "The electronics box of the SSG1000 is designed to be installed below the instrument on the ground, which could be flooded during snowmelt. After SPICE, the manufacturer was asked to provide longer cables allowing the installment of the electronics box about 0.5 m above the ground. After this modification, there were no problems with water and electronics during the following snowmelt season." These statements mix instrument setup description with results and recommendations. Better wording and location of the information should be found ; in addition the data for the season 2015/2016 are not included in the analysis so the statement about the fix s not substantiated by the data analysis. Please consider adding the corresponding data to the ms, or place this information towards the end of the ms (conclusions or implications).

- There are a few structure issues in the Results section, in particular the fact that there is a section 3.1.2.1 without a 3.1.2.2 section which means that the section 3.1.2.1 could be simply a paragraph, or that section 3.1.2 could be split in more subsections.

- Last, I'm asking you to enlarge significantly all font sizes in the Figures, taking into account that most Figures in TC articles are csingle column width, and should still be readable.

I thank you for performing the changes, the then-revised manuscript will be sent for review to the same reviewers as the previous round.

Dear authors,

The article has undergone a new round of review. While one reviewer is now satisfied with the content of the manuscript, another one has identified several points where the manuscript should be improved before final publication. These are listed on an annotated manuscript provided by the reviewer (#3).
I therefore ask you to proceed with minor editions of the manuscript as suggested by the referee, and submitted a final version of the manuscript which I hope I will be able to accept without further external review.

Yours sincerely,

Samuel Morin

Dear authors,

Thank you for your thorough assessment of the reviewer feedback from the latest round and the revised manuscript which I'm glad to accept in its current state.
However, I ask you to add an acknowledgment for the reviewers' work, which is central to the quality insurance process of papers published in the peer-reviewed literature although it comes with little concrete credit except in the acknowledgment section of the article. In the current case, two reviewers have provided significant comments to this article, one of them is not anonymous (Charles Fierz, from WSL-SLF Davos).

Many thanks for this, and thank you to have chosen The Cryosphere to publish these results.

Yours sincerely,

Samuel Morin
Special Issue Editor