Dear authors,

thank you for these revisions. I am happy to suggest minor revisions based on the referees comments now. Based on the referee reports and you rebuttal, I will likely not send out the manuscript for another round of reviews. Please include a highlighted manuscript in your next round of revisions.

I am surprised that you do not refer to the work of Stefanie Gubler, who spent her entire PhD on uncertainty in permafrost simulation and came up with a nice framework for describing it in her 2013 GMD paper. This is not an editorial request, as I am obviously biased. Just a comment.

Page 24 of this manuscript creates the impression that excess ice and a coupled hydrology are part of future permafrost models and, as a consequence, not available today. COUP has had a coupled hydrology for a long time and has been used for permafrost studies, GEOtop has it and the Endrizzi et al. 2014 GMD paper the influence of water on temperatures, including lateral flow, is shown. I believe that also Surfex has it, but am not entirely sure. There is also paper by Hanna Lee 2014 that discusses excess ice. At least locally, this effect could be more important for you here (slope) that in their findings. Please include the discussion of these effects in your section on uncertainty. This is important as it may affect in part your current results (why are they good if there is no water balance? is the WB really not important? is there no excess ice?) and in part the ability of this model to predict future conditions.

Please change the TCD references for Gisnås and Fiddes to the final papers in TC.

I look forward to your revised manuscript and to seeing your work published in The Cryosphere.

Kind regards,
Stephan

Dear authors,

thank you for those revisions, which address well the concerns outlined by the reviewers. I have two final requests:

In Figure 1, please indicate the location of the 10m boreholes as requested by one referee. You can do this easily by using a differing symbol.

You have added "spatially distributed in-situ data sets are required
to calibrate and validate spatially distributed modeling schemes in heterogeneous
permafrost landscapes.", referring to Gubler et al. 2013. Are you sure that you refer to the right paper (not the one of 2011)? The 2013 one reports on an extensive sensitivity study that shows how much uncertainty can be introduced when simulating heterogeneous environments. While the need for spatially distributed measurements is mentioned there, the main contribution of that paper is an entirely different one. And, in my mind, it is highly relevant for discussing uncertainty in this type of simulation. Even though this model does not have a coupled hydrology and explicit energy balance, many of the parameters w.r.t. e.g., found discretization will have similar effects. Again, as I am biased as a coauthor, feel free to ignore my comment if you believe this does not add to your work.

Both my comments do not influence the validity of your results and I trust you will find a good way to deal with them. There will be no further review.

Thank you for submitting your work to The Cryosphere. I look forward to the publication of this manuscript.

Kind regards.
Stephan Gruber