This paper presents a classification study on the relationship between remotely detected crevasses and spatial variation of ice rheology. The study concludes that the relationship is weak and that the use of remotely detected crevasses to directly map damage in ice flow models may not be a good way of improving ice flow models. This study provides valuable information for other ice modelers attempting to represent fractured ice in their simulations. The work is overall well designed and presented. I would recommend it for publication after addressing the minor revisions and questions listed below (organized in a few broad categories).

Improve the image quality and readability of some figures.

• Figures 1 and S2 can be difficult to read and would benefit from higher resolution.
• Figures 1 and S2 have difficult to read legends partially due to resolution and partially due to the low contrast between text color and background color.
• Figure S1: I recommend changing the top left box in each matrix to a lighter background color with better contrast. It can be difficult to read the numbers on a printed copy.

Include some additional technical details to better understand the study's methods.

• Line 160: you interpolate the field "A" onto the regular crevasse mask coordinates. Could you briefly name or explain the interpolation method?
• Are results robust to changes in the other regularization parameter? The paper focused on sensitivity in one parameter, but not the other.
• Is there a numerical threshold or method for determining the "consistent agreement" mentioned at the end of the Figure 4 caption?
• In Figure S3(b) for the highly damaged case, the ROC curves become close to random classifiers at high values of the regularization parameter. However, the opposite is true for the "all crevasse" case in Figure S3(a). What is the reason for that behavior?

Provide some additional context/clarity for some background information and conclusions.

• Lines 35-38: Can you provide citations for the impact of surface crevasses in different situations?
• I was confused by the "(see details below)" note in line 48 and the "(described further below)" in line 56. Can specific sections or subsections be referenced to make that information more clear?
• I find it interesting that for the analysis on Pine Island Ice Shelf including only heavily damaged crevasses (Figure 3b), the relationship no longer behaves like a random classifier. I would be interested to know what attributes "heavily damaged crevasses" have that other crevasses lack in the input data. I think that some brief discussion of the input data's classification method could provide valuable context to the "heavily damaged" result.
• Is there a different well-motivated choice in sliding law or sliding law exponent (e.g. regularized Coulomb friction) that would affect the results of this study? How dependent is the spatial variation of "A" dependent on the sliding law for this study?
• Lines 365-366: You state "We find that for any threshold value, the performance of this predictor is like that of a random classifier". That seems inconsistent with the "high damage" study in the manuscript. I don't think that the "high damage" study weakens the paper's overall conclusions, but is an interesting result that perhaps merits some additional discussion.
• Lines 382-384: you mention the possibility of surface crevasses penetrating to the water line. Can you give additional context to the correlation between surface crevasses reaching the water line and inferred variation in ice rheology?
• I quite like Figure S6 as a visualization for the classification. Can a similar figure for Filchner-Ronne ice shelf be included as well?

Technical Corrections

• The acronym OPTtimal operating PoinT (OPTPT) defined in the text (lines 184 and 197) differs from the acronym used in Figures 2 and 3 (OPT-PNT), assuming the two have the same meaning like I believe they do.
• Table T2: Column 2, Row 3 has an extra "tab" space that should be deleted.
• Notation for the equation in section 1.3 of the supplementary information should be made consistent. Most of the terms use forward slashes but "Cost(P|N)" uses a vertical bar in the text.

This study examines whether the surface crevasse field observed from remote sensing is related to the flow rate factor derived from inverse methods constrained by surface velocity. A poor relationship is found, suggesting that surface crevasse observations may not be a good proxy for quantifying ice damage affecting ice rheology over a thickness relevant to ice flow dynamics.

The study addresses an important topic, as observational constraints on ice damage are critical for assessing ice shelf dynamics and stability in ice sheet models. The methodology is rigorous and clearly described, and the results are convincing and well presented. I recommend the paper for publication in The Cryosphere after major revisions.

General Comments

My main concern is that the inferred flow rate factor from surface velocity is consistently presented in the manuscript as the truth that the observed crevasse field should match. I think this way of presenting the study is not fair as it could be turn differently. For example, the crevasse field could be presented as the truth that the inferred flow rate should match, and one could conclude that the model does not capture the effective viscosity and stress field well due to its simplification, inappropriate physics or inaccurate ice shelf three dimensional geometry. The manuscript clearly lacks of a discussion about the model assumption and the reliability of the inferred flow rate factor. Even if the model is strongly constrained by surface velocity observations, it does not sound right to question the utility of crevasse field observations without even mentioning that the weak relationship could be due to the model lacking the relevant physics. Are we sure that the inferred flow rate factor is not affected by neglecting the elastic stress field or the depth-dependent variation of the flow rate factor or other things? The whole study could also conclude that the SSA does not capture the stress field of the ice shelf well, because the inferred value of the flow rate factor is weakly related to the observed damaged areas. This would give the opposite message to the community ...

I suggest that the authors should also consider the case where the SSA approximation is the cause of the discrepancy, and provide strong arguments if they think this cannot be the case.

Specific comments

You will find a small list of correction and specific comments embedded in the annotated PDF in attachment.