Dear Anna Puggard and co-authors,

Your manuscript has now received two thorough reviews. Both are supportive of the analysis and offer points of constructive criticism. In particular, both reviews point out some lack of clarity in the study methods and aims, and both question the overall study design as being "overambitious" or audacious and complicated". Thank you for your analysis and response to the reviews. I am optimistic that the manuscript will be improved by your suggested revisions.

I suggest taking care to describe the study methods in your revision, and emphasizing that the comparison is between each RCM and the ASCAT melt maps, rather than an intercomparison of the RCMs.


I have two additional comments on top of your suggested revisions.

- In the proposed edits to L212-214, there are some logical errors. FP should say true negative and FN should say false positive.

- Please rephrase your proposed sentence to edit L150 so that if you choose to continue to use “fully saturated signal” you define it explicitly. As proposed now, the sentence links the two ideas loosely but doesn’t specify that “fully saturated signal” is equivalent to the second part of the sentence.


I look forward to seeing this work improved again in another revision. I believe it will be a worthy contribution to the surface mass balance literature. Thank you again for your work and attention to addressing the reviewers' comments.

Cheers,
Kristin Poinar

Thank you for your revised manuscript.

Dear Anna Puggaard and co-authors,

Two reviewers have now had the opportunity to look at your revision. Please especially note the comments from Referee #1, who finds two major points that need improving. First, more work needs to be done to specify "presence of water" rather than the too-specific "instance of melt" that is sometimes used in the current version of the manuscript. This precision is important. Second, a more major point, is the referee's suggestion to add a new comparison that could unify some unexpected outcomes in the current results (the time delay). This could potentially prove to require a significant investment of development and analysis time, but would substantially improve the manuscript.

I am hopeful you will take the time and earnest effort to undergo another round of improvement to your manuscript.

Cheers,
Kristin Poinar

Dear Anna Puggard and co-authors,

Thank you for your revised manuscript. Your revisions have indeed improved the presentation. I have the following comments that would need to be addressed before your manuscript can be published.


Terminology of "melt" and "melt maps". I thank you for your choice to change "melt" to "liquid water" throughout, following the reviewer's insight. However, I still find use of "melt maps" to be incorrect, and now inconsistent within the new terminology of the manuscript. I agree with the reviewer that "melt map" is a misleading name, and I disagree with the authors' assertion that the terminology should be repeated in order to agree with recent work (Nagler et al., 2024 and Boxall et al, 2024). Those studies did not have the benefit of this astute reviewer comment, but this does not mean we need to propagate their flawed terminology forward. Please rename all "melt maps" to something consistent with what they are: "liquid water maps" or however you judge best to craft it.

Other minor suggestions:

"Therefore, the baseline threshold was set to the smallest value possible " -- Please state the value (0.1 mm w.e./day). These sentences also appear in both the Methods and the Results section. Please remove them from Results.

Table 1, "the mean July and August air temperatures" -- this would be clearer as "the mean July through August air temperatures".


I am hopeful that you will be able to enact these small improvements.

Cheers,
Kristin Poinar

Dear Anna Puggard and co-authors,

Thank you for your rapid revisions.

The Copernicus system has detected that some attention is needed on one or more figures with respect to colorblindness. It was not immediately obvious to me which figure(s) this referred to, but I trust you will be able to use the url provided to find out and make the needed changes.

With your figure revision, I also ask for one change in the text. This is simply for better wording on the single use of "melt maps". Instead of "also known as ASCAT melt maps" within the sentence, I suggest a separate sentence that says something like "Our ASCAT liquid water maps are directly comparable to so-called melt maps in other studies, such as XX et al. (2024) and YY et al. (2023)."

Cheers,
Kristin Poinar

Dear Anna Pugaard and co-authors,

I need to consult with the expert reviewer(s) on your terminology stance.

Cheers,
Kristin Poinar

Dear Anna Puggaard and co-authors,

Thank you for your patience while we solicited a final reviewer comment. I have reexamined your most recent reply (the one prompted by Thomas Nagler) and manuscript and reconsidered the terminology. I request that the term 'melt map' be, again, largely replaced by more accurate terminology - one suggestion is 'wet snow' rather than 'liquid water', as described more below.

The term ‘melt mask’ remains problematic because what the satellite observes doesn't correspond to the melting process itself, but to what partly results from it. Just because we've had a misuse of language for 40 years doesn't mean we shouldn't try to correct it. At the same time, the authors' arguments do show that the term ‘liquid water map’ might be ambiguous. So why not use a term like ‘wet snow map’, or talk about ‘wet snow occurrence’, as is the case in various studies (Banwell et al., 2023, https://doi.org/10.1029/2023GL102744, Dethinne et al., 2023, already cited in the manuscript).

The term 'melt map' is a shortcut that must be explained much better if/when it is occasionally used. This would entail explaining and insisting that it's the presence of water that's observed, and that a large part of it is the result of melting, so it has sometimes been called a melt map for simplicity's sake. However, this does not correspond directly to what is modeled in the RCMs, and this term has its limits, such as the notion of the timing of events, etc. In its current form, the paper is not transparent enough about this, especially to a reader who might be rapidly reading the abstract and the conclusions.

I would encourage you to see this slight revision as an opportunity to shape the language used in your discipline! It ought to be very possible for you to present an even-keeled justification for using the slight substitution, while still acknowledging that what you are presenting is exactly the same concept as what has been referred to imprecisely for 40+ years. I am confident that you can do this without offending anyone, if in fact you are worried about that.

Thank you, also, for your attention to the box outlines Figure 5. But as I look at the figures again, I believe it might be the 'rainbow' color maps on Figure 6 that are triggering the flag. If the warning comes again, that is my suggestion.

Cheers,
Kristin Poinar

Dear Anna Puggaard and co-authors,

Thank you for your revisions. Thank you also for correctly interpreting my typo - I did indeed mean melt "maps" and not "mask".

I am pleased to accept your manuscript for publication. It will next undergo copy-editing, proofreading and typesetting by the editorial team at Copernicus. Please work with the diligent staff on any language clarifications they discover or insert.

Congratulations on the forthcoming publication of your manuscript.

Cheers,
Kristin Poinar