Dear dr. Gunnarsson,

Based on reviews provided by 2 anonymous reviewers, I have decided that minor revisions are required before your manuscript can be considered for final publication in HESS. Both reviewers have a generally positive impression of your work and both stress the robustness of the conclusions. Based on my own assessment, I share the reviewers' impression. I have read the manuscript with particular interest since our group organizes a yearly excursion to Iceland, during which we deal with issues such as data availability and impacts of climate change also discussed in your work. Most suggestions by the reviewers concern improvements to the structure and presentation. Please consider these suggestions seriously, also the suggestion to add a flowchart on the methodology. Anonymous Referee #1 also asks for a better discussion on snow trends in the Northern Hemisphere. In this respect, you might find the following recent study from our group useful, which also contains analysis of some snow depth observations in Iceland (https://doi.org/10.1029/2018GL079799). There is no need to cite this work (I just happen to know this work well because it was my student who published it), but it might contain useful references. Since the comments are mostly textual, I see no need to return the manuscript to the reviewers and will evaluate the revision myself.

Looking forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Best regards

Ryan Teuling

Thank you for submitting your revised manuscript. Overall it seems that the reviewers comments have been addressed adequately. My only (technical) reservation is that the font size of some of the figures remains small (in particular 1, 2, 12, 13, 14) which was also commented on by the reviewers. This cannot be changed later, therefor I ask you to submit a new version with adjusted font sizes. I will accept this version with corrections so there shouldn't be much delay.