Final editor comments

Title. I suggest to use: "Future climate and surface mass balance of Svalbard glaciers in an RCP8.5 climate scenario: a study with the regional climate model MAR forced by MIROC5”

Last sentence abstract, I suggest: "By 2085, SMB is projected to become negative over all of Svalbard's glaciated regions, leading to rapid degradation of the firn layer."

In section 2 you have added so much text, that it negatively impacts the readability of the paper. Please follow my suggestions below for a more concise formulation.

Lines 55-67, I suggest to reformulate as follows:
"For the first time, this study uses an atmospheric model fully coupled to a snow module, explicitly solving the energy and mass balance of glaciated regions. This coupling allows to explicitly take into account the atmosphere-surface feedbacks in future SMB projections. This computationally intensive approach currently allows only a single scenario and forcing model to be used, but we provide evidence in Sect. 2 that this is a representative combination of models."

Lines 89-100, I suggest to reformulate as follows:
"MIROC5 has been successfully evaluated over Svalbard in the companion paper Lang et al. (2015). MIROC5 performs as one of the best CMIP5 GCMs over Greenland (Fettweis et al., 2013; Belleflamme et al., 2012). Over Svalbard, MIROC5 also performs well and the near-surface temperature bias from MIROC5 is insignificant over land. As a result, SMB, precipitation and runoff modelled by MAR forced by ERA-Interim and MRIOC5 are not significantly different over the present era."

Lines 101-129, I suggest to reformulate as follows:
"Melt increases non-linearly with temperature, so it is very important to realistically simulate the present climate, especially the elevation of the 0 C isotherm. Of course, simulating a realistic current climate does not necessarily mean that future changes are also robust. CMIP5 GCMs do not project significant circulation changes in the Arctic (Belleflamme et al., 2012) so that projected temperature changes dominate the SMB change (Fettweis et al., 2013). The temperature increase projected by MIROC5 follows the CMIP5 ensemble mean until 2060 (Fig. 1) and exceeds the ensemble mean after that. Our projection for 2100 with this forcing may therefore be representative for later decades, not altering the main results. The extreme scenario RCP8.5 has been chosen to have a forced warming signal that significantly exceeds natural interannual variability."

line 164: decrease -> increase

Caption Fig. 6: and have been summed -> and has been summed

line 196-198: Suggest: "...and will be reduced to less than 5% of the total glaciated area of BE as soon as 2035 (Fig. 5)."

line 238: start new paragraph

lines 253-256: "Moreover, glaciers are typically concentrated at higher elevations, where the negative elevation bias in MAR is largest, leading to further overestimated mass loss."

line 265: typo "hifh"

Fig. 7: Please first present the absolute values in a) and b), and then the differences in c) and d).

line 306: "...in qualitative agreement..."

lines 324-331: "At present, there is a large west-to-east SIC gradient, caused by the North Atlantic Drift that prevents sea ice to form west of Svalbard. In a warming climate, the SIC gradient will decrease, hence strongly reducing the west-to-east gradient in near surface air temperature."

line 361: Choose "winter snowfall" or "winter snow accumulation"

line 380: "...by changing snowfall that is projected..."

line 419: Explain why the subsurface heat flux is not in your surface energy balance. Do you assume it to be zero during melt?

line 500: "...meltwater retention capacity..."

line 528: "...part of the ocean surrounding Svalbard is already ice free in the current climate."