Dear Luisa,
Thank you very much for your detailed point by point response to the two reviews. I would like to see the revised manuscript to make a decision on this paper. Thank you for taking the need for the work to be reproducible seriously, this is important, and for submitting data to a public data base. I realize that the revision you are making is substantial due to the need to shorten and rewrite sections of the manuscript, however I expect you have already done much of the work. Hence I am recommending minor revisions. If you should need extra time do let me know. If I see disparities between my reading of the manuscript after revision and the response to the reviewers concerns I might request an additional review, however at the moment I hope this is not needed.
Best regards,
Jenny

Dear Luisa, Christian and Wolfgang,
Thank you for your detailed response to the two reviews. I find you have responded to all concerns and feel this paper can be published in The Cryosphere. I have some suggestions for improvements to the narrative that you may want to consider before publishing.
Best regards,
Jenny

Editorial suggestions

In places I find your language a little gramatically convoluted in places. I would suggest getting someone to proof read to check your clarity of expression. I tried to provide suggestions where I could.

Line 3: "The closing corresponded to". As a native English speaker I would not choose to use "corresponded to" here. While this word is technically okay I would choose "presented" as this word invokes that you used a natural event as an opportunity to investigate the ice dynamics.

Line 40: Do you mean to include precision of 2.01m? Also, what is mean maximum sail heights? The length scale over which you average is important. Sails can be much taller than this. I am off the opinion that this information is not actually needed here, and even a little hard to unpack.

Line 69: Kwok (2002) is singular, so change "have shown" to "showed" or "has shown".

Section 2
"We quantified the large-scale thermodynamic growth and thickness changes in the FYI zones, the latter from the decrease of FYI area during the closing of the polynya"
... this is not completely sensical. Do you need to replace thickness changes with "thickness redistribution"? It would also help to specify if this is quantified from observations or a model.

line 125: "is base on the strong conductivity difference between seawater and ice used to determine the vertical distance" Grammar is off a bit here, perhaps simplify the sentence. " AEM thickness retrievals find the distance to the strongly conducting seawater under the ice.

line 130: I do not understand what you mean by "the effects compensate for the mean thickness". Rephrase. I think you mean "The two effects compensate each other such that the mean thickness is found to be in close agreement with drill-hole measurements." Do you need to specify this is for ridges, or are the effects only compensated with you include level ice?

line 149: We seperated MYI from the newly formed FYI

line 162: You have not defined the varibles in the equation. Also, I think you want to specify you perform the fit to the ice thickness distribution.

line 172: along which profiles? Specify Polar-5 or icebridge.

Section 2.2: How different are the answers for the growth rate based on the model you used and freezing degree days? The reason I ask, is it is important to understand the magnitude of the volume error that thermodynamics growth might present.

line 209: I would remove the sentence about not accounting for the reduced ice growth as the mean thickness increases, because the model does this for the level ice and is reducing the ice growth rate as the mean ice increases dynamically. Unless you are using the model to only track level ice thickness, and have turned off the dynamics.

In general you need to define varibles in your equations. Equation 2 define y for example.

line 349: -div(vh) = -h div(v)

line 365: only very locally

line 390: "quantify the thickness change from the large scale" does not make sense to me. Do you mean "for the large scale"?

Table 1: Check formatting. It is overrunning a margin.

Line 546: I am not sure quoting the mean trajectory length means anything here.

line 551: I think you need a "that" in front of dominated. This sentence is quite long, consider spliting it to easy readability.

Line 619: Specify what "it" is in "it lacks the frequent occurance ..."

Line 647: "notions of the importance of the ice dynamics" What notions? Personally I would either not choose to use this word or I would clarify "notions of the ice dynamics being significant to the thickness distribution". Notions is really just a wishy-washy word. You can quote Rothrock, Thorndike or Wadhams on the importance of redistribution in the thickness distribution.

Line 650: " if stronger and more frequent deformation can contribute to could partially compensate for the expected, continuing sea ice losses. " If you are going to claim this as motivation for your study you do need to give some indication as to how unusual your results are that 50% of the thickness increase is due to dynamics. I think you just need to be more quantitative in the comparison of the three studies.

line 655: flight -> flights

line 665: as a linear function

Section 4.2: This testing of theory is actually some of the more intresting outcomes of your work, in my mind. I wonder if it deserves some mention in the abstract.


Figure 3: You show the exponential fit, not the efolding value. Change caption to reflect this.

Figure 4: "By March 1, 2018, the thermodynamic thickness amounted to 0.38 m" Perhaps a better sentence is "The new ice that grew in the polynia was 0.38m thick by March 1, 2018.".

line 209: I would remove the sentence about not accounting for the reduced ice growth as the mean thickness increases, because the model does this for the level ice and is reducing the ice growth rate as the mean ice increases dynamically. Unless you are using the model to only track level ice thickness, and have turned off the dynamics.
Dear Luisa and co-authors,
Thank you for your prompt response, and I would like to personally thank the reviewer who really improved this paper.

I only have one suggestion, in case you want to address it. See below. Otherwise I have happy with this paper and am recommending it is published,
Jenny

The estimates of the thermodynamic growth (from the MITcgm) is uncoupled from the dynamic changes, because dynamics were switched off. Therefore, we regard this sentence as important information to our reader.
- Can you clarify the sentence so it is clear to the reader that dynamics are switched off in the model? This was hard to understand in the paper.