Dear Conrad

Thank you for the revised manuscript and your detailed reply to all the points raised by the reviewers.

I'm pleased to announce that the manuscript can now be published in TC.

I have a few minor comments that you might want to consider incorporating into the final version, but this I leave to you.

-I feel some of the citations give a bit distorted view of the literature. I would suggest citing the original work as much as possible. For example the SSA approximation is not as recent as 2011. Maybe cite the original paper my Morland or Physics of Glaciers instead?

-Eq (11) seems to imply that \sigma_{xz}=0 for s=z which is not correct in the SSA approximation.


-You mention a priori knowledge, but I failed to see where that is introduced, or is the assumption \nabla \alpha_{a priori}=0 ? Generally one might expect a prior info to be introduced through a a-prior field and a corresponding covariance matrix as has been done in several Bayesian inversion studies in glaciology in the past.


Thanks for submitting this very interesting and valuable piece of scientific work to the TC!

Greetings

Hilmar Gudmundsson
co-editor in Chief