The authors have done a thorough job addressing the referees comments and increased the clarity where necessary. At this stage, I would welcome the authors to provide a revised version of this manuscript for review.

Dear Dr. Supriza-Azuri,

I thank you for your careful revision of the manuscript. The issues of non-stationarity in spin-up, using proxy data, and proper uncertainty assessment in parameterization I believe are real strengths of this week. While deep and numerous soil columns have been noted previously, your team has provided important new insights and 'lessons learned' when using now ubiquitous land surface models in cold environments.

Sean Carey, McMaster University