Based on the favorable reviews of the revised manuscript from both referees, I am pleased to accept the manuscript for publication in The Cryosphere after addressing the few very minor comments of reviewer #2. In addition, based on my own reading of the revised manuscript and initial comments by the reviewers, I would suggest a couple other minor edits to the manuscript text to tone down some of the conclusions. The results in this paper are preliminary, based on necessarily limited comparisons that while promising, do compare rather poorly in some regions. As the authors themselves suggest further exploration of the sensitivity of the waveform fitting method is needed (and as stated will be undertaken). A few additional qualifying statements in a few places might be helpful so that the limitations of the method (in present form) are clearer to the reader. For example:

The sentence on line 19-20 of the abstract is a strong statement, and does not convey any potential weakness in the method. e.g., figure 10 shows large differences with ICESat in some regions, the reasons for which are unclear, and while figure 7 shows a promising agreement overall, there are substantial differences over long segments that seem unlikely to be explained by the differences in footprint. A sentence that points out such weaknesses is warranted here.

Figure 6 shows some reasonably large sensitivity to the fitting method. This is acknowledged. But perhaps the authors could add a sentence or two that conveys the magnitude of the potential impact of this uncertainty on the overall results.

Page 13, line 10-12 (and last sentence in conclusions). This is speculative, and I am skeptical that this is positive evidence that snow depth is being more accurately retrieved here. This region can have positive freeboards, but I don’t think there is evidence to suggest it is more common here than elsewhere (such as the western Weddell), and there certainly has been flooding observed here. To be fair, the authors do not make a firm positive statement here, but I’d qualify it a bit more.

Figure 10 – as noted above, there are major differences with ICESat in some areas. Some of these differences may be due to the different time periods as noted, but it is interesting that Cryosat-2 freeboards are significantly lower than ICESat freeboards in all areas that typically have deep snow. Could this suggest a potential area for future improvement of the waveform model?

Minor technical corrections:

Page 1, line 29 – I think you mean higher (i.e. further south) latitudes here, rather than lower.

Page 1, line 32 – ‘balance’ doesn’t seem like the right word (the energy budget will balance regardless of the albedo). Perhaps ‘moderate’?

Page 2, line 38 – ‘..higher than the snow-ice...”