Dear Authors,
thank you for the revisions of your manuscript. These have now been reviewed and you can find the reviewer's statements below. I am willing to accept the manuscript for publications once these comments have been satisfactorily addressed. Please provide replies to each comment and the tracked changes in your second revision of the manuscript.
Thank you very much and best regards
Christian

Dear authors,
thank you for the revisions of the manuscript and consideration of the reviewer's comments. Unfortunately it seems that you have not considered the comments of Reviewer 1. Maybe they were not easy to find because the online system had some troubles after the unintentional withdrawal of your manuscript at some point. Therefore I attach them here, see below. Please respond to these comments and include revisions as appropriate. Sorry for the inconvenience.

I can see that that reviewer also had some important remarks which I wanted to make myself. In addition, please add labels a-d to figure 3, and verify that the grey and black dots are correctly described in the caption. I think they are swapped.
Also, please remove or define diffusivity. You are still using the term in one or two places although it is unusual and undefined.
I agree with the reviewer below that the abstract should be improved.
Thank you for your consideration and best regards

Christian Haas


Other review that should be considered please:

2nd Review for "Comparison of CryoSat-2 and ENVISAT freeboard over Arctic sea ice: Toward an improved Envisat freeboard height retrieval" by Guerreiro et al.

General comments:

The revised paper has improved significantly and certainly provides more information on the processing steps. However, I still think that the paper can be improved, certainly in terms of clarification. Therefore, see my comments below:

Specific comments:

P1L5: Probably somewhere here, I think it must be stated that both CS2 and ES have been processed using the same algorithm.

P1L5-L14: For the Abstract, this paragraph is to difficult to follow from my point of view. I would suggest to combine the part about the along track analysis with the part about the gridded freeboard below. May be you can just start like: "The analysis of along track data and gridded radar freeboard in conjunction with Envisat pulse peakiness maps suggests …"

P1L9-L10: I would avoid parenthesizing here and in general in the Abstract, except for values and numbers.

P2L24: I still find the usage of the term "accuracy" somewhat confusing here. I think the higher accuracy in the CS2 measurements mostly is a result of the SAR processing. On the other hand, the unrealistic ES freeboard can be corrected by tuning the retracking algorithm and/or the retracking threshold. This would accommodate the different footprints. And this is what I would call a "bias" correction. But in the end, ES freeboard will still be more noisy than CS2 freeboard, due to CS2 SAR processing. This is what I would associate with "accuracy".

P2L25: Here and at other places: I am not so sure about the usage of "better". Could "more realistic" provide a better description?

P3l32: What does the CTOH netcdfs contain? geo-located waveforms? l1b elevations? What kind of data are you using? Please, be more specific here.


-Even though more details are now provided in the new version, I am not sure what you mean by "what kind of data are you using" considering the information we already provide. Is it better now? If not, could you be more specific on you expectations please?

--Yes, I think it is better now. The description is much more detailed now and this makes it easier for the reader to follow.

P4L25: Here, for example, "accuracy" is used as I would expect.

P9L9: drive(s)

Figure6: Please, add a legend with Envisat (blue) and CryoSat-2 (black) directly in d). Also, in the PDFs, it seems that Envisat= Envisat/PP? Please, check this.

Table1: Units are missing.

Table2: Units are missing.

thank you Kevin! Congratulations to a fine paper.