Dear Marijn van der Meer and co-authors,

Thank you very much for submitting your detailed responses to our two reviewers’ comments. Both reviewers are very positive about your manuscript, and, in view of your answers, I invite you to submit a revised version.

In your response to Reviewer #2 comment #3, could you stress that you mean “underestimation and overestimation” of the year-to-year variability e.g., “… leading to overestimation or underestimation of the year-to-year variability.”

Please, be informed that your revised manuscript will be sent to Reviewer #1 for re-evaluation.

Best wishes, Brice Noël

Dear Marijn van der Meer and co-authors,

We have received comments from reviewer #1 that now recommends publication. Based on the positive reviewers’ assessment, and your thorough revisions, I am, in principle, happy to accept your manuscript for publication in The Cryosphere. Please consider the following technical corrections and minor comments before submitting your revised manuscript, that I will review once more before acceptance.

Best wishes, Brice Noël

-----------------------------------------------------

Technical corrections:
L21: “… driven by the surface mass balance (SMB).”
L26: I suggest “calibrate/evaluate” instead of “calibrate/validate”
L32: “retrieve PMB from elevation change …”
L40: Do you mean “… explored PMB simulations forced by World Glacier …”. Please clarify.
L52: Add a reference to Fig. 1 as: “… across the Swiss Alps (Fig. 1).”
L52-54: I suggest: “Switzerland stands out … glacier measurements compiled within the Glacier Monitoring … program, dating back to …, notably for … (Huss et al., 2021).”
L57: “…, our approach allows for: 1. capturing … at local scales. To determine … 2. Tailoring ML … datasets. Switzerland’s …”
L70: “training/evaluation”
L76: Do you mean: “… Section 5.6 analyses the drivers of PMB in miniML-MB.”?
L82: “air temperature (T in ºC), and ii) total precipitation (P in m w.e.) …”
L84: Do you mean: “In our approach, we extract T and P data from the meteorological grid-cell nearest to the location of each individual PMB site.”?
L196: “… from ERA5-Land air temperature at different … ”
L210: “set to 1 m w.e. m-1” as this represents a precipitation gradient.
L237: “… best combination of months for both temperature and …”
L239: “months for temperature …”
Caption Fig. 5 L4: Replace “one would get” by “obtained”.
Caption Fig. 5 L4-5: “Frequency of … precipitation in (b-c) the 1% … and (d-e) the best 50 …”
Fig. 5a: sub-label (a) mentions RMSE, do you actually mean MAE? Please modify.
L313: “… 2022’s PMB. PDD model’s predictions …”
L349: “identify” instead of “validate”?
L377: Do you mean: “For C3, late winter and spring precipitation (Feb.-June) …”?
Caption Fig. 11 L5: For consistency with Fig. 6 “orange crosses” instead of “orange ticks”.
L498: I suggest: “… to predict PMB, and captures the characteristics of individual sites enabling a site-by-site application.”
L509: “… was extracted/retrieved from the Copernicus website:”
L516: “… conceived the study.”
Caption of Fig. A1 L3: .”… extreme years (grey line).”
Caption of Fig. A5 L4-5: “for T, and […] for P, i.e., the frequency of …”

Technical comments:
Caption of Fig. 3 and L115-116 and: Captions usually do not discuss the figure content, but rather briefly describe the sub-panels with specific references within the main text. For instance, L1-8 of Fig. 3 caption should be included in the main text (e.g., L115-116) with specific references to sub-panels a, b and c where appropriate. The figure caption can be brief: “Conceptual overview of … (ML) model. a) Pre-processing … from MeteoSwsiss. b) Example of an X array with a half-yearly aggregation, i.e., including four predictors (n=4), and c) the resulting predicted PMB timeseries (ˆy) covering N years.”

Caption of Fig. 4: Similar comment to the one above.

Fig. A5: Please add sub-labels a) and b). The Figure caption does not mention the difference between t2m in sub-panel a) and T in sub-panel b). “tp” is not defined in the caption. Could you modify the legend of sub-panel b) so that "w" appears as a subscript of T and P, i.e., instead of using T_w and P_w.

Dear Marijn van der Meer and co-authors,

Thank you very much for submitting your responses. I went through the revised version, and I am now happy to accept your manuscript for publication in TC. Congratulations on a very interesting study, and for the excellent work achieved in the revision process.

Happy New Year, and congratulations again!
Brice Noël

---------------------------------

Typo correction:
L516: “M. van der Meer and H. Zekollari conceived the study.”