This paper is a thorough summary of all of AWI's radar data, collected in Greenland and Antarctica for more than three decades. The technical parts summarizing the radar developments from the 1990's through to today give an excellent and informative overview of the developments over the years, including useful summaries of the various aircraft and antennas flown, and useful track plots for the yearly campaigns. This kind of overview has not been easy to find anywhere, and with the complete data set now being published openly following FAIR principles it is now much easier for researchers to locate data for potentially new scientific studies. Such new studies, especially in the densely covered Dronning Maud Land and NE Greenland region, could also represent a good future dividend of the huge expenditures AWI, and thus the German taxpayers, must have had over the many years in support of polar science and the campaigns.

The science content in the submitted paper is not new, in the sense that the summary of science results over the three decades have essentially all been published elsewhere. But the long list of papers in the references, many known, many not so known, by the broader polar radar and EO community are very useful, not least new for ph.d.'s and post.docs.

I therefore recommend strongly this paper be published, this will be a useful reference for present and future science, and complement nicely similar data summaries from other groups/agencies with extensive radar collections, such as NASA/IceBridge and the British Antarctic Survey. It also acts as an inspiration for other research groups to make sure their radar data - historical or recent - are described and made available in a timely fashion, to the benefit of all scientists involved in the studies of the icesheets. And also a good document as acknowledgement of the large amount of logistics support provided by other national programs in Antarctica, as well as other agencies (and Danish military) in Greenland. 

The text itself seems carefully checked, and I found only very few misprints (e.g. on p. 46, "Station Nord logical support ..."). Given the German-heavy presentations and science results, an acknowledgement could be in place to augment the statement "pilots and mechanics from different contractors over time" (p. 4)", with a direct mentioning of the Kenn Borek Aviation crews of Polar 5 and 6, all succesful polar campaigns is typically a function of both science, logistics, and especially experience air crews.

Dear Editor and Authors,

Please find attached my review of Franke et al. (manuscript number: 2025-5328) with manuscript title “Review article: 30 years of airborne radar surveys on the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets by the Alfred Wegener Institute”.



This review paper and its associated data release is a great achievement for the polar radar community, and for AWI specifically who have done a lot of work to make 30 years of radar data across both the Arctic and Antarctica available to the wider scientific community. The data is fully available in open-access format, follows FAIR data principles, and is efficiently accessible through the new Radar Data over Polar Ice Sheets data viewer. Of equal importance, this review paper is very well written, the figures and tables are clear, and the text forms a great resource for current and future scientists wishing to interact with the AWI data and the science that came from it.

Together, there are now three large data providers (CRESIS, BAS and now AWI) that have released most of their aerogeophysical data over Antarctica and the Arctic in freely accessible formats. The repercussions that these data releases have on polar science cannot be understated, and I look forward to seeing other institutes follow through in future years with their own data release.

I have several minor comments regarding the text, figures or tables (see associated file), but as a whole, I would recommend this paper to be published in The Cryosphere with minor revision. I very much look forward to seeing the updated version soon online.

With best wishes,

Julien Bodart