Dear colleagues,

the manuscript requires further major revisions before it can be accepted. In addition to the comments raised by the referees I'd like to add that some figures need to be improved, e.g. the black vectors in Fig. 3 are largely overlapping and Figure 8 looks really strange.

Regarding the case of the rivalling independent publication of Korosov and Rampal (2017) I acknowledge that your manuscript was submitted earlier and published first in the Discussion.

Best regards

Lars Kaleschke

Dear colleagues,

the manuscript requires still further improvements before it can be accepted. In addition to the comments raised by the referee I'd like to stress that the quality of the presentation is still not yet satisfying. As already stated previously, the vectors in Fig. 3 are largely overlapping, Fig. 5 and 7 have no axis labels and the meaning and significance is not clear.

A section of "author contributions" is missing.

I further highly recommended to obtain a DOI for the code in the Github repository. Otherwise it is not clear to which version you refer to.

Best regards

Lars Kaleschke

Dear colleagues,

I am pleased to accept your manuscript and thank you for adequately addressing all comments and questions.

Thank you for submitting your work to The Cryosphere!

Best regards

Lars Kaleschke