Review of

PROMICE automatic weather station data

by Fausto and others, submitted to ESSD

General

This paper presents an overview of the near-surface climate, surface mass balance, and GPS data collected by the PROMICE network of AWS on the Greenland ice sheet. The PROMICE data have been transformational for the study of the climate of the Greenland ice sheet, the evaluation of (regional) climate models, and the validation of satellite data. The paper is generally well and concisely written and the figures/tables are clear. So I recommend publication after some minor issues have been addressed, see below.

Major comments

p. 1, l 10, section tilt correction: It would be illustrative to provide the average corrections that were obtained for SWin for the various AWS.

Section 4: instead of presenting time series of two selected AWS, which comes across as somewhat arbitrary, I would have preferred a table with climatological averages, including the SEB terms, simply to demonstrate that the stations are suitable to base a climatology on in the first place and that they are in climatologically distinct regions, which is the main asset of PROMICE. This could be accompanied by a brief analysis of basic climate information e.g. near-surface lapse rate, SWin/SW_TOA, etc.

Minor and textual comments

p1, l. 18: "Presently, the PROMICE AWS data are not included in any reanalysis product such as ERA5, aiding studies with an independent assessment of the performance of regional climate models, and other numerical models that aim 20 to quantify surface mass or energy fluxes (Fettweis et al., 2020)." Has this been a deliberate choice? Is it an option to reverse this in the future, to improve the reanalysis products themselves?

p. 2, l. 11: "allows full coverage of the ice sheet," suggest: "allows coverage in various climate zones" as full coverage is evidently not possible and/or aimed for.

p. 3, l. 23: "snow and ice ablation/accumulation" suggest: "snow ablation/accumulation and ice ablation"

p. 8, l. 11: "to quantify ice dynamics" suggest "to quantify ice floe velocity"

The authors present a well-structured technical description of the PROMICE AWS variables and instrumentation. The presentations of the data processing chain, the measured variables and each instrument are all robust, and it is easy for readers to find relevant information in the text and tables. I did not notice any technical or scientific issues that need to be addressed. However, the text could be improved as shown by my list of linguistic comments below.

1,3: Change “is” to “are”

1,4: Change “to” to “of”

1,13: Change “in” to “by”

1,14-15: Too many brackets. This is a general issue throughout the manuscript

1,17-18: This statement should be supported by one or more references

2,17-18: Be consistent with respect to the usage of capitalized letters in “Greenland Ice Sheet” or “Greenland ice sheet”. Please check the entire manuscript for consistency

2,25: Insert space before “The”

3,16-17: This sentence regarding maintenance visits seems to be misplaced as this subchapter concerns the design of the tripod. Consider moving this sentence to the last paragraph in section 2.2

4,6: Change to “encodes”

4,17: Typo in “production”

5,5: It would be more informative for the readers if the name of the barometer manufacturer is mentioned in the body text

7,13: Insert “Figure” before “2”

7,17: Insert “of” in “… in-/outflow of antifreeze …”

7,18: Insert “Figure” before “2”

8,21: Insert a hyphen in “Post-processing”

9,13: Typo in “respectively”

9,18: Be consistent throughout the manuscript in whether “Van” should start with a lowercase or uppercase letter

9,18: Change “;” to “and”

9,27: Insert a comma after “m” and change “are” to “is”

9,28-29: Rephrase this sentence to make it understandable

10,12: Use past tense here – change to “emphasized”

10,13: Who are “they”? Rephrase this sentence

10,18-19: Change to “For a horizontal radiation sensor, the direct beam …”

11,15; Change “are” to “is”

11,16: Insert “.” after “AWS”

11,19: Typo in “manufacturer” and change to “estimates”

11,22: Be consistent in the use of “Fig” or “Figure”

11,28: Insert “the” before “field”

12,13: Change to “Eighteen out of 26 stations …”

12,27: Use lowercase first letter in “piteraq”

13,17: It would be good with more consistency in the comma usage. For instance, the authors use comma after “Also, …” (13,14) and “Below, …” (13,15), but no comma after “Here …” (13,17)

15,13: Move “e.g.” to the bracket

15,18: Insert “of” before “26”

Table 1: Could you be more specific with respect to the MM or DD of the last visits?

Table 2: The caption text is wrong

Table A1: Reconsider the use of uppercase letters in column 1 - this comment is also relevant for other tables. I would also recommend left-aligned text in column 1. Use lowercase first letter in “barometric” in the caption

Table A2: Use lowercase first letter in “hygrometer” in the caption

36,4: Insert a comma after “shield”

41,2: Delete “:”

41,5: Use more formal language instead of “… that allow us to …”

41:9-11: Rewrite this text into full sentences.