Antarctic sea ice and snow play an important role in regulating the global climate system. However, scare observations limit our understanding of atmosphere-sea ice-ocean interaction processes in Antarctic. The aim of this study is to improve our understanding of the temporal evolution of sea ice and snow around East Antarctica based on in-situ observations, reanalysis, and simulations. This study starts from presenting the evolution of sea ice thickness and snow depth by using the SIMBA measurements collected at Khalifa site. Then this study provides a wealth of analysis on atmospheric rivers. Overall, I recommend the publication of this study but suggest that the major revisions are needed before publication.     

My biggest concern is that the transition from observation analysis (Sec. 3) to AR analysis (Sec 4) is vague or invalid. This makes the paper appear as two separate parts, lacking overall coherence. In the part of observation analysis, the result shows that ST increases during ARs due to precipitation, and SIT increases by 0.04 m during the 14 November AR due to snow-ice interactions. But in my opinion, the authors does not fully explain the direct impacts of ARs on changes in ST and SIT. I think the following questions should be answered at least, otherwise, it would be far fetched to directly connect the extensive analysis of AR in the remaining part of the article.

• What are meteorological conditions near the sea ice surface during ARs? How do meteorological conditions affect the SIT and ST variations?
• It seems that precipitation plays an important role in affecting ST variations. What are the special features of the increase in ST during ARs compared to the ST increase during other snowfall events?
• Why does the SIT only increase during the 14 November AR period, while it does not increase during other ARs?

On the other hand, I suggest the authors to add the analysis of observed near-surface meteorological elements (e.g., wind speed, wind direction, air temperature and humidity. ) near the observation site and its impacts on ST and SIT variations.

Specific comments

Lines 508~509：How do you infer that SIT changes are mainly caused by oceanic forcing? From Figure 2, it can be seen that changes in SIT are mainly controlled by the growth and melting at the bottom, but it cannot be directly attributed to oceanic forcing, as the growth and melting of ice at the bottom is the result of competition between oceanic heat flux and conductive heat flux, and the conductive heat flux also depends on how much energy the ice absorbs from the atmosphere.

Lines 514~520：How does equation 10 consider the process of snow-ice transition? This may affect the explanation of changes in ST with SMB.

Line 522：Add a space between “sea-ice” and “SMB”, and delete “.” before Foehn.

Figure 3: The line for SMB is always covered by P line, and the line for M is also invisible. It is easy to cause misunderstandings. I suggest redesigning the display of results, perhaps using dual y-axis can solve this problem.

Line 540~542: How should I understand the ST is decreasing during blocking high events, but the occurrence of blocking coincides with the the passage of ARs and ARs always lead to an increase of ST as the observations present? 

Figure 4: How to identify the blocking from Figure 4a and 4d?

Lines 852~853: The evidence is weak to make this conclusion.

Lines 854~856: Only the increase of 0.06 m in ST during the 14 November AR period is given in the result part.

Lines 865~866: This is contradictory to your statement given in Lines 568~569.