Overview Comments:

The authors use contemporary reanalyses to explore the relationship (primarily) between annual snowfall and the primary modes of variability affecting ice rise locations along with West Antarctic coast to the west of sites drilled by BAS.  Ice core observations to extend the contemporary record of the “pole of variability” are really needed to provide a much longer-term perspective for this critical region for global sea level rise. The goal is to identify those sites that are more favorable to reconstructing specific modes going back decades to centuries (?) in the past. The challenges that reanalyses experience prior to 1979 (Bromwich et al. 2024) emphasize the need. The authors are suitably cautious about the fidelity of reanalyses along this coast post 1979  especially that has limited direct observations. Figure 3c verifies the need for caution, although the precipitation variations in Fig. 3d are very similar. Overall, I found this analysis interesting, significant, and well done apart from a few issues that need attention, constituting a minor-major revision.

Specific Comments:

1. Line 15: Add “current” before “relative”
2. Line 39: Proxy temperature seems more likely.
3. Line 54: A good reference to add here is doi: 10.1016/j.gloplacha.2017.04.008
4. Line 72: weaken not deepen.
5. Line 89: O’Conner et al. (2025) is just an abstract. More recent publication details where the details can be found?
6. Line 106: I do not understand what “uniquely unbiased” means.
7. Lines 124 and 125: You need original references for ERA5 (Hersbach et al. 2020, https://doi.org/10.1002/qj.3803) and MERRA2 (Gerlaro et al. 2017, https://doi.org/10.1175/JCLI-D-16-0758.1).
8. Fig. 3c: It is distressing to see the divergence of the temperatures in mid 2000s between ERA5 and MERRA2. Please do some more investigation as to how and why this occurs. Particular sites are to blame? Etc.
9. Section 3.1.2: Looking at Figs. A1-A4 the zonal winds along the West Antarctic coast appear to be easterlies (U<0). If so, this will change your interpretation of the correlation coefficients between precipitation and the zonal winds.
10. Lines 241-242: ..”high-pressure ridging..” Presumably this relates to the positive pressure anomalies at high latitudes when SAM is positive.
11. Line 264: Stronger southerly flow corresponds to V > 0 not V < 0.

Review of "Climate Controls on Snowfall at Coastal West Antarctic Ice Rises - Potential Ice Core Sites " by Andreasen and Neff

This article presents the relationship between precipitation at Antarctic ice rises and several key atmospheric circulation or oceanic indicators (Southern Annular Mode, Amundsen Sea Low, and El Nino-Southern Oscillation). Section 1 summarizes previous Antarctic ice core sites, and presents the potential importance of future ice core drilling at Antarctic ice rises. Section 2 examines the reanalysis data and conclude to use ERA-5 in further analysis. Section 3 is the main results of the article, presenting the correlation between precipitation at 13 potential ice core sites from WAIS and atmospheric circulation indices. The analysis led to two main conclusions for the proposed ice core sites: [1] the West Sector of the WAIS coast, where precipitation is strongly influenced by Southern Hemisphere westerly winds; and [2] the East Sector, where precipitation is strongly influenced by synoptic-scale pressure systems along the Bellingshausen Sea.

I believe the methods used have not been sufficiently considered for the research purpose of assessing future ice core sites for climate reconstruction. The most critical point is that ice cores do not necessarily record precipitation; they record surface mass balance.

Surface mass balance is determined by several processes, including precipitation, refreezing of water, surface melting, sublimation of ice, and blowing snow erosion (e.g. Equation 2 of van Dalum et al., (2025)). At high annual-mean temperatures like those in Table 1, significant melting can occur during austral summer, which makes it very hard to reconstruct past precipitation. To address this issue, a global reanalysis like ERA-5 and MERRA-2 has very limited ability to address surface mass balance. Instead, I recommend that authors analyse regional climate model simulations. Recently, several regional climate simulations have been published (van Delum et al., 2025; Agosta et al., 2019). As these regional climate models have been evaluated by number of observed surface mass balance observations, These datasets have a certain degree of credibility. In fact, the Antarctic regional climate model, RACMO, has been used to examine ice-core data (Thomas et al., 2017). As those regional climate simulations were forced by reanalysis including ERA-5, I think the analysis in the current preprint can be utilized in the same manner.

Major Comments

• Section 2 presents the correlation between ERA-5 and MERRA-2, but this analysis does not guarantee that these models have sufficient ability in simulating precipitation. I recommend using the surface mass balance from the Antarctic regional model(s), as these models have been evaluated by observations. The same applies for surface air temperature.
• Table 1: The method used to calculate climate information for each ice rise point is not explained. Is the elevation the elevation of the observed terrain, or the elevation from the ERA-5 reanalysis? Also, the temperature and precipitation should have been calculated from ERA-5, but how were they calculated? Are they calculated by bilinear interpolation based on the latitude and longitude? Also, are these annual average temperatures and precipitation values ​​calculated at a single point in the table, or are they averaged over the ice rise? Please clarify.

Specific comments

L34: I think Barr & Lovell (2014) does not fit here because the study is Antarctic Morraines.

L111: Why were these 13 ice rises selected from 30 ice rises (L109)? Is it based on the size of the ice rises? Please clarify.

L37: what does “considerable (poorly observed)” indicate? Maybe conradicting to L36.

L150: “steig box” is not a frequently used word. Maybe changed to “S12 box” or relevant in this article. In addition, Steig et al., (2012) proposed the box as an indicator of U-wind but not analyzed V-wind, so there seems to be limited reason to analyze the V-wind and discuss its relationship with Steig et al., (2012).

Table 1: unit [degC] missing in temperature. And please clarify the unit of precipitation, [freshwater mm/a, or ice mm/a].

Figure 1 caption: [1] What does “remaining” ice core sites really means? Does it mean the site is not drilled yet? Please clarify. [2] Please clarify that red dots indicate “existing” or “previous” ice core sites (if I understand correctly).

Figure 4: sentences “To reconstruct…” are unnecessary in this figure caption.

Figures 4, 5, 7, 8: Bottom figure panel showing climate index locations can be unnecessary (figure caption is sufficient).

Figures A1-A4, I don't understand why A1-A4 are necessary in this research article, because the figures seem to present a summary of previous research. Also, the caption lacks the information of red dots.

Data availability: The data used in B1 and B2 (the SAM index and the ENSO index) can be specified.

References

van Dalum, C. T., van de Berg, W. J., van den Broeke, M. R., and van Tiggelen, M.: The surface mass balance and near-surface climate of the Antarctic ice sheet in RACMO2.4p1, The Cryosphere, 19, 4061–4090, https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-19-4061-2025, 2025.

Agosta, C., Amory, C., Kittel, C., Orsi, A., Favier, V., Gallée, H., van den Broeke, M. R., Lenaerts, J. T. M., van Wessem, J. M., van de Berg, W. J., and Fettweis, X.: Estimation of the Antarctic surface mass balance using the regional climate model MAR (1979–2015) and identification of dominant processes, The Cryosphere, 13, 281–296, https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-13-281-2019, 2019.

Thomas, E. R., van Wessem, J. M., Roberts, J., Isaksson, E., Schlosser, E., Fudge, T. J., Vallelonga, P., Medley, B., Lenaerts, J., Bertler, N., van den Broeke, M. R., Dixon, D. A., Frezzotti, M., Stenni, B., Curran, M., and Ekaykin, A. A.: Regional Antarctic snow accumulation over the past 1000 years, Clim. Past, 13, 1491–1513, https://doi.org/10.5194/cp-13-1491-2017, 2017.