Dear authors,

the two referees are mostly satisfied with your answers and changes made to the manuscript. However, one referee still requires revisions and the other rates the manuscript scientifc and presentation quality only as fair, in contrast to the choice "accepted as is". Moreover, you have not yet adressed my initial comments which I repeat below. For this reason I can only accept the manuscript subject to further revisions.

To me it is not clear what the ultimate aim of the study is. To learn more about ice phenology of the large lakes or to show that the microwave model agrees with observations? Or the retrieval (?) of phenological parameters?

It was not made clear what the advantages of the microwave model and the SMOS data as compared to AMSR-based methods.

The overall presentation quality is only fair. Some details are missing, e.g. the weblinks are not enough for the reproducibility. The data and the model could be described in more detail. Equation 1 comes with little motivation and introduction. Data sources and processing steps (smoothing, time averages?) for the figures are not clearly described.

Best regards

Lars Kaleschke

Thank you for the revised version of the manuscript and for trying to address the remaining reviewers and my comments. I am not entirely satisfied with the level of detail and traceability which is necessary for reproducing your results. Some values for parameters are missing, e.g. for the correlation length l. The links to the data sources often lead only to the top level domain and it is not clear which particular data set was chosen. However, I consider the above as technical corrections and leave it to the responsibility of the authors. That said, I am pleased to accept the paper subject to technical corrections.

A section of authors contribution and competing interest is also missing:
https://www.the-cryosphere.net/for_authors/manuscript_preparation.html