Dear authors,

Thank you very much for the detailed response. Please adjust the manuscript accordingly and submit both a clean version and a version highlighting the changes along with the response letters. I apologise for the slight delay if my decision caused by the fact that the semester started more or less at the time the responses were provided. For the sake of time I will not send the manuscript once again to the reviewers if the all the comments are incorporated as stated in the response.
Do not hesitate to ask in case you have any questions.

Best regards,

Tobias Bolch – Editor TC

Dear authors,

Thank you very much for the thorough improvements of the manuscript.
I have only few comments left, once addressed I am happy to accept the manuscript:
Reviewer 1 asked whether you think that the findings would hold true for finer or thicker debris. I recommend to add at least a short discussion about the applicability instead of just refereing Fig. 3 and Table A1.
With respect to swapping Figures 8 and S2: This is a difficult decision and both figures are interesting. Ideally, I would like to see both in the manuscript. However, you have already quite a lot of figures and should not increase the number of figures. Maybe you can move another one to the supplement such as Fig. 5 which can easily described in words?
With respect to the comment on just citing the papers in table 3. I favour in general brevity and this manuscript is already relatively long. However, to be consistent in style and depth of information iI am in line to keep the section as it is.
I am not satisfied with the reply to the comment by reviewer 2 on P29 L23. Please make sure that the location of the measurements are clearly indicated. See here also my comment below on the caption for table 3.
Minor technical/stylistic comments:
P. 8L3: The link does not work properly, exclude “):”. I suggest to add the full list also in the supplement as experience shows that links to websites can be outdated in a while.
P12L3f: The sentence is not clear. Please improve.
P21: Caption Table 3: The caption is very long and contains important information about data measurements, methods and uncertainty. This info should be presented in the respective section. I would omit the info about the data format as TC is a European journal and the order is very clear from the numbers like 19/07/2014
P20 last sentence and P22 1st sentence. Here you refer in two subsequent sentences to the table which is not the best style. “Table 3 shows the three computed point mass balance values for 2013 and 2014, as well as available measurements.” “The glacier under completely dry debris melts significantly more than the glacier situated under fully saturated debris in all three periods displayed in Table 3.” I would add the years in the caption only and for the 2nd sentence simply refer to the table in brackets instead of writing “displayed in”.
P32L6: The reference Scherler et al. (2018) provides information about a percentage of debris cover on the global glacier and would an appropriate citation for the relevance of the study but not really for increasing debris cover. I would add here Kirkbride and Deline (2013) as also cited in Scherler et al. (2018) as evidence for increasing debris cover. You might also be interested to read in this regard Tildize et al. (2020).
Please do not hesitate to ask in case you have you questions.

Best regards,
Tobias Bolch – Editor TC

References:
Kirkbride, M.P., Deline, P., 2013. The formation of supraglacial debris covers by primary dispersal from transverse englacial debris bands. Earth Surf. Process. Landforms 38 (15), 1779–1792. https://doi.org/10.1002/esp.3416.
Tielidze, L.G. et al. (2020). Supra-glacial debris cover changes in the Greater Caucasus from 1986 to 2014. The Cryosphere 14 (2), 585–598. https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-14-585-2020.