Dear authors,

Many thanks for the elaborate response to the points raised by the reviewers. I believe the suggested changes would further improve the manuscript without changing the main conclusions of your work. Yet, the changes are more than minor and also the discussion of the impact of the 6 cm diameter of the CCR will be of interest to the referees, as two of them raised this point in their comment. I invite you to submit a revised manuscript with the suggested changes and will send this back to the referees for a second round of reviews.

Kind regards,
Bert Wouters

Dear authors,

Thank you for submitting your revised manuscript, which has been reviewed by two referees. As you can see in their report, they are satisfied with the your modifications and recommend publication after some minor revising. In addition, I have some further suggestions for improvement listed below.

Please include these final modifications in your manuscript, after which I expect your work to be ready for publication in our journal.

Kind regards
Bert Wouters


Line 43: Capitalize 'Salar'
Line 63: change to 'capability for the estimation of volume changes...' since part of the changes of the firn are unrelated to mass changes
line 204-205: the description of the RGT here is confusing, unclear what 'they' refers to. Your description seems to imply that there's one RGT for each beam pair, but that is not the case. See https://doi.org/10.5067/ATLAS/ATL06.003 for a description of the RGTs: "The Reference Ground Track (RGT) refers to the imaginary track on Earth at which a specified unit vector within the observatory is pointed. Onboard software aims the laser beams so that the RGT is always between ground tracks 2L and 2R (i.e. coincident with Pair Track 2)."
Line 324-325: could you add information here about which beam track passed over the CCRs, as you did for Zhongshan station?
line 407: 'location, environmental conditions, and time'
line 438 'attributed to': do you mean 'contributed to'?

Dear Authors,

Many thanks for the addressing the final comments on your manuscript. Your work is now almost ready for publication, but I would like to ask to make one last change to the text:

On line 442, change to "Although we cannot conclusively say so, this increased “signal-to-noise” ratio may have..."

Many thanks,
Bert Wouters

Dear authors,

Thank you for making this final change. It's my pleasure to let you know that your paper is now accepted for publication in The Cryosphere. Congratulations, and thank you for your valuable contribution to our journal!

Kind regards,
Bert Wouters