Dear authors, the key reviewer for this paper and I are satisfied that the revised m/s is suitable for publication in TC subject to addressing the minor issues raised below. I sent you a copy of the GRL paper cited by the reviewer.

Best regards, Ross Brown (ed).

Reviewer comments:

I find the manuscript satisfactorily improved. In particular, the text is more compelling and better-referenced; figures 2 and 4 are better, and the addition of Figure 1b is helpful. A couple of remaining minor issues:

Figure 3 has changed, and many of the exceedance curves are less smooth than before - the caption mentions that this is now a 5-day average, but I don’t see either what prompted the change (in reviewer comments - maybe it was from an online commenter not directly addressed) or what methodological difference might explain it.

There’s a paper just published that might be worth including, on the 2015 snowpack in the western US: GRL doi:10.1002/2016GL069965

The text needs another careful editorial pass; I found several remaining (and new) examples of sentences that didn’t quite parse, whether from words that are extra or missing or out of order. Reading aloud is sometimes helpful at finding those sentences.

Thanks for the response and the edits Eric. Congratulations and all the best in your future work.

Ross B