Final decision of editor based on comments of two reviewers, minor revisions undertaken and the revised version of the manuscript.

Dear Daniel Farinotti,
This paper received two in depth reviews that were both overall positive and clearly stressed the importance and relevance and also quality of the work, but had some rather minor issues suggestions for revisions.
The main comments and suggestions concerned:
1) Structural issues regarding the model description and the suggestion of regrouping them by categories and shorten the model description (moving details to supplements)
2) Adding some more discussion of model performance by categories and adjust figures/table accordingly
3) Clearer recommendations and discussion regarding model use/development
4) Provision of experiment and result data (link to dataset repositry).

The authors addressed all these issues and suggestions of the reviewers very well and corrected the very minor technical/editing issues. Therefore I am very happy to inform you that the paper will be accepted after correction/addressing of a few very minor technical issues that are listed below.
I thank the authors for their careful revisions.


Technical very minor comments/corrections:

p. 2 line 17: should be in plural: ‘…number of methods HAVE been…’ (number of demands plural)

p. 4 line 87: should be in plural: ‘…ARE given by …’ (as it refers to time periods (plural).

p. 8 paragraph 4.1: I am not sure here but most of these minimization approaches actually are actually relying on mass conservation as well (as they use a forward model which uses this), certainly the Fuerst model is very close to a mass conversation model, and on line 142/143 it also says it is based on the mass conservation method of morlinghem, but which is in the category ‘mass conservation’.
Maybe it would useful to clarify in the introduction of the ‘minimization approaches’ theses models use implicitly mass conservation as well (in the forward model) but then further constrain it.
Also note that the ‘Fuerst’ approach is now in ‘TCD’ in review.

p. 12 line 255: in this title, the ‘between’ and ‘inter’ are repeating themselves. Should it not be ‘Between-model comparison’?

p. 18 line 391: there is a reference missing after ‘Norway’ (currently just a ?)

p. 6: Fig 6: add a fine horizontal line at the zero y-axis level so one can better see how far the results deviate from zero

p. 23 line 468: I would delete the ‘rather’, either it is marked or not!

p. 24 fig. 7 caption: add that the models are ordered after the categories.

In conclusions: is there nothing worth mentioning about the category ‘shear stress approach’ in the conclusions? All other categories occur.

p. 27 line 527: again, there is a reference missing after ‘e.g.’ (currently just a ?)

Supplementary Material

p. 3 line 8 from bottom: delete one ‘and’

p. 4 paragraph S1.4 Fuerst: note that the ‘Fuerst’ approach is now in ‘TCD’ in review.

p. 5 onwards: suddenly the font is smaller, should be consistent throughout.

The editor
Andreas Vieli