Dear Dr. Libois

Thank you for the revised manuscript. I found that your reply and changes sufficient for publication. Nevertheless, I have a few minor corrections, which I ask you to change in your manuscript (added below).

Best regards
Martin Schneebeli
Editor TC


Here a few points which need minor corrections:

line 9 "among others", do you mena "other factors" or "other papers"? In any case, a much more precise parameterization of the thermal conductivity is presented in (Löwe et al, 2013)".

line 11: "The instrument": indicate type and manufacturer

p. 14, l 6: "pointed" -> "pointed out"

p. 14, l 10 "It does show a positive bias of about 2 K": air or snow surface temperature?

p. 14, l 19 "priority on" -> "primarily to" or "with priority to"

p. 16 l 20 "and somehow maintained..." -> this is not "somehow", alternating temperature gradient (Pinzer and Schneebeli, 2009) causes no coarsening and consequently an almost constant SSA

p. 19 l 18: definition of "winter period" is very loose, defined by a threshold temperature, net radiation. A clearer definition of the term is needed.

p. 20 l 21: change "XXIst century" to twenty-first century

p. 24 l 6: "whole continent" -> the whole continent

Acknowledgements: add: The editor thanks the anonymous reviewers for their work.


@article{Lowe2013,
author = {L{\"{o}}we, H. and Riche, F. and Schneebeli, M.},
doi = {10.5194/tc-7-1473-2013},
journal = {The Cryosphere},
number = {5},
pages = {1473--1480},
title = {{A general treatment of snow microstructure exemplified by an improved relation for thermal conductivity}},
volume = {7},
year = {2013}
}