Review of the manuscript entitled "Blowing snow contributions to the Arctic snow-on-sea ice budget using ICESat-2 observations" by Robinson et al.

General comments

The paper presents a comprehensive study of multi-year pan-Arctic estimates of blowing snow occurrence, associated properties, and transport and sublimation fluxes for the winter season, based primarily on ICESat-2 satellite observations and secondarily on simulations from a high-resolution snow model (SnowModel-LG) and a simple threshold-based model (DY2001). While the approach to derive blowing snow from satellite observations is based on earlier work, the authors introduce a new method to enhance the reliability of blowing snow retrievals from ICESat-2. It is demonstrated that blowing snow exhibits a strong dependence on wind speed and that the strong interannual variability of blowing snow occurrence is related to the Arctic Oscillation. More importantly, the authors demonstrate that blowing snow sublimation contributes substantially to the Arctic snow budget, while blowing snow transport plays a minor role in this regard. The paper is well structured and well written, the methods are comprehensible, and the conclusions are logically consistent. I recommend the paper for publication in TC, subject to a few minor, mostly technical revisions.

Specific comments and suggestions

Lines 520–521:  To better understand the relationship between blowing snow transport and blowing snow burdens, I suggest explaining how blowing snow burdens are actually defined/calculated. This could be done in the caption of Figure S5.

Lines 538–542:  From my point of view, it is an important finding that blowing snow transport plays a relatively minor role in the basin-scale snow budget. It suggests that snow redistribution by blowing snow transport can be neglected. Given the high variability in wind direction and wind speed, I wonder whether the low divergence of blowing snow transport in Fig. 7c is just a consequence of averaging. To exclude averaging biases and to substantiate the finding, it would be helpful showing the divergence of blowing snow transport separately for the individual cold seasons, for instance as additional figure in the supplement.

Technical issues

Lines 237–238:  (as described in section 2.5 and Table 1 of (Liston et al., 2020) → (as described in section 2.5 and Table 1 of Liston et al., 2020)   [two left parentheses but only one right parenthesis]

Line 250:  sublimation is a calculated as → sublimation is calculated as

Line 308:  transited from Svalbard towards the Canadian Arctic Archipelago → transited from the Canadian Arctic Archipelago towards Svalbard  [as Figure 1 indicates]

Line 410:  21.9 % → 21.8 %

Line 414:  (b,d) → (c,f)

Lines 445–446:  The temperature range "−25 ⁰C to −20 ⁰C" is missing in the caption of Figure 5.

Line 470:  Fig. 5e → Fig. 5f

Line 515:  Fig. 1 → Fig. 2

Line 519:  Fig. 1b → Fig. 2b

Line 540:  Fig. 7e → Fig. 7c

Line 569:  2021-22 → 2020-21  [if actually referring to Fig. 4; the NSIDC-reference is misleading and can be dropped]

Line 597:  Fig. S7 → Fig. S8