Dear Authors

After carefully reading the reviewers' reports and your revised version, and asking again for the reviewers' opinion on your reply and the revised document, I regret to announce that I cannot accept the corrected version of the article as you propose.
The reviewers still think that the propagation of errors is not correctly done and are not mentioned when certain estimates are made (eg lines 439, 473, 505) , that the scientific content is relatively poor although interesting questions are asked without the data being able to answer them and that the article is too long for its scientific content.
For example, the dechlorination of marine aerosols is a well-known process, so there is no need to write a 20+ lines paragraph to indicate that the results are consistent with previous studies;
Similarly, the discussion on potassium is rather poor and does not allow to conclude, the ternary diagram is useless, a discussion on nss sulfate is sufficient, the principal components analysis does not bring any new element justifying such a development. Several essential references on e.g. the stability of nitrate in snow are missing (Freyer 1996, Neubauer 1988, Legrand 1990).
The correlations of nitrate and sulfate with accumulation have already been shown and either their interpretation has already been made (sulfate) or do not allow to deduce a result without knowing a priori this result by other means (nitrate).

In spite of this and like the reviewers, I think that the data from the traverse deserves to be published, especially because this type of measurement is rare in Antarctica. I therefore suggest to the authors to drastically shorten the size of the manuscript by focusing on the new results of their study compared to previous ones and passing quickly over the similarities. To this end I recommend the submission of a short paper in the form of a brief communication rather than a research article.

Neubauer, J., and Heumann, K. G.: Nitrate trace determination in snow and firn core samples of ice shelves at the Weddel Sea, Antarctica, Atmos. Approx. 22, 537-545, 1988.

Freyer, H. D., Kobel, K., Delmas, R. J., Kley, D., and Legrand, M. R.: First results of N-15/N-14 ratios in nitrate from alpine and polar ice cores, Tellus, 48B, 93-105, 1996.

Legrand, M. R., and Kirchner, S.: Origins and variations of nitrate in south polar precipitation, J. Geophys. Res, 95, 3493-3507, 1990.

Dear Authors

I am pleased to announce that I accept the document in its current form. As a short communication, the document is much more readable, more direct and less lengthy. This version avoids unnecessary development, repetition and analysis and presents the essential results.