Dear Ann, dear Ed,

I have now received two reviews on the revised version of your manuscript. The reviewers are generally happy with the revised version, and only raise some minor issues that I hope you can address for a then probably final version of your manuscript. Please examine in particular if you can address the additional suggestions by the second referee.

Thanks again for submitting this paper to The Cryosphere,

Best,

Dirk

Dear Ann, dear Ed,

thanks again for submitting this work to The Cryosphere. I am happy to now accept it for publication.

In reading the final version, I noted however to instances where an additional clarification would be helpful. Please consider including one or two sentences for the following to items:

1. Given that most climate models output the "equivalent ice thickness" (Hibler, 1979), which is the grid-cell average thickness of the ice including the zero-ice thickness of any open water in that cell, I would find it helpful to clarify that your "effective ice thickness" is the real ice thickness not including any contribution from open water.

2. Frazil ice:It might be helpful to clarify how the frazil ice contributes to the thickness of the existing ice. This is because one would usually expect a higher ice growth per unit area of open water than per unit area of existing ice, so one would expect a higher ice growth of frazil than of basal ice. I assume that the total growth of frazil ice is indeed higher in the model, but is than converted into ice-thickness change by averaging the frazil-ice growth over the area of the ice-covered part of the grid cell. This should be explained.

Thanks again for submitting this work, which will nicely inform upcoming papers based on hopefully widespread CMIP6 SIMIP output!

All the best, and have a good summer,

Dirk