Dear Yide and co-authors,

Many thanks for providing your extensive response. The two reviewers raised some major concerns on the original manuscript. Your suggested changes may potentially address those, and I invite you to submit a revised manuscript, which will be sent out again for review.

Many thanks
Bert

Dear authors,

Many thanks for the update manuscript. As you can see in their reports, that referees still have identified some outstanding issues. Most of these are about the figures, but some also about the results and interpretation. I invite you to submit a revised manuscript, which I will review.

Referee 2 provided a list of comments on the figures. Please implement all the suggested changes and add explanation where requested by R2. Likewise, implement all the suggestions made by R1 concerning figures. If you decide to keep both the right and left ICESat-2 beams in figure 9, please motivate your choice in the rebuttal. Please also show the areas along the transect that Sentinel-1 detects grounding, if data is available there.

Regarding the first comment of R1, I agree that this sentence is unclear: “Ephemeral grounding region, characterized by double-differential vertical displacements close to zero, shows significant correlation with oceanic tidal variations (Figures 6-7 and Movie S1).” Specifically, it is unclear what is correlated with the ocean tidal variations, since ‘Ephemeral ground region’ is not a quantity that can be correlated to something else.

On line 235-237, add the correlation value.

Related to the point above, please p-values for whenever you give correlation values.

Include references to Joughin, 2021 where appropriate.

R1 is correct that the lack of melt observations after 2020 doesn’t limit the ability to observe grounding events, since this is based on satellite observations. Please adjust.

Furthermore, I agree that the discussion of the melt rates can be strengthened by adding a more thorough and transparent analysis, and a discussion of other processes that can explain the discrepancies between the melt rates and elevation changes.

Line 339: “The melt rate may influence the ice thickness near to the grounding line upstream than the ice rumples K and L”: Is there a word missing before ‘than’ - more/less than, for example? This sentence is unclear to me, please rephrase.

Fig A: add the locations of the PIG-S and PIG-N station in the Landsat image. In the caption, make clear over which area the ‘Time series of mean ice-equivalent freeboard thickness’ are calculated.

In all the figures containing ICESat-2 and REMA data, make sure that the figure legend is correct (there is no ICESat-2 data before 2018).
In the abstract, add a short explanation of what ‘ephemeral grounding’ is, for non-experts.

Dear authors,

Many thanks for updating your manuscript. It is now almost ready for publication, pending two changes:

- In the description of Figure 9: "tracks 965 and 1094 that WERE used..."

- In figure 7c and 2, the numbers of blue and red lines now match. However, they do not line up. For example, fig 7c shows 7 grounding events (3 blue, 4 red) in Dec 2020/Jan 2021, but in fig. 7d, they appear to occur in Nov 2020. Please check your code and ensure the grounding events are plotted on the right date in both figures.

Thanks
Bert