Dear Authors,

thank you for your response to the careful and constructive reports by the two reviewers. My first impression of your initial paper was already good, and this has been substantiated by the overall positive feedback of the reviewers. Their criticism and your adjustment have led to further improvement, and I now see no further obstacles for moving this paper to the peer-reviewed ESSD publications.

Congratulations for a well done study. I compliment you for publishing your code along-side the other data, and also for your commitment of regularly updating the discharge estimates using the living data option. This, in my eyes, is a significant step forward for the operational monitoring of Greenland’s ice discharge and I wonder if this will be feasible for Antarctica. I also want to highlight the detailed work of both reviewers, it has been a pleasure to read their insightful comments. Below you find some smaller editorial comments which I came across when reading your revised version. Feel free to address those during typesetting.


Kind regards,

Reinhard Drews



P2, l 19 I think what you mean is “..an estimated vertical profile from the observed surface velocity..”. I connect “vertical velocity” directly with the z-component of the velocity, rather than the variation with depth of the horizontal velocity.

P 3, l 23 I think it is “ice velocity” but “ice-velocity maps”. However, there seem to be different style of doings this with compound nouns and I am unsure which one is right.

P7 eq. (4) and (5): I understand that you consider the choice of your density value as a minor error source in your analysis. This is probably correct, because for Greenland most of the flux gates will be in blue-ice zones without much firn cover (correct?). In Antarctica, this will not be the case and the choice of the depth-averaged density is probably not as straightforward and will introduce an uncertainty of at least several percent. This could be worth mentioning.

P7, l 28: Are you sure that it is phrased correctly that you “..ignore .. the elevation change error \sigma_H..” ? I think what you want to say is that the thickness error is much larger than the velocity error.


Acknowledgements: Consider thanking the reviewers for their (from my perspective) constructive input and careful reading.

Figure 1: Looks nice. For completeness I suggest adding a scalebar and colormap for bathymetry.

Figure A1: Consider adding legend for gate colors so that their meaning can be grasped quicker (and without reading the caption)

Figure A5: one datapoint has sneaked into the background of the legend. Can this be adjusted (the legend, not the datapoint) ?

Figure B1d: the limits of the colorscale on the positive end (1200 m?) seem a bit excessive. However, maybe there is reason for showing the symmetric deviation