The reviewers in general are favourable to the paper, they slightly differ in their opinion as to wether the paper is major or minor corrections. In general most of the comments and requirements for changes in the manuscript are for clarifications. The authors have done a good job of responding to these but one or two are left very general in terms of the edits and changes that are expected. So I think we need to send the paper back for further review once all the changes are made. Please do at this stage consider any additional figures/tables you feel are needed to respond to important points the reviewers make. Also I would like to make sure such matters as those responded to (P7 L188 comment) as to any implications for not dealing with such considerable elevation changes as 150m between the grid node and the AWS data. This seems particularly important to me when trying to evaluate simulations... (I didn't necessarily see you proposed a change in the paper)

Dear Authors, that you very much for your responses to the reviewers comments and revisions to your paper. At this time I believe the two reviewers would be happy to evaluate the paper again and so we shall assess your changes with a final review stage, best wishes, Jim

Both the latest reviews for the revisions are now favourable to the paper and most issues of concern have been clarified. Everyones time in these 2nd round evaluations are appreciated and the work the authors have done on their revisions and responses. However review2 (in particular) has still noted some points that require a little more work to complete the revision process. I understand those points and so am happy to proceed as long as the authors satisfactorily respond and adjust their manuscript accordingly. I shall then review these changes and make my final recommendation for publication.., best wishes, Jim Freer

Dear Authors,
The reviewers are now favourable to publication and I believe you have provided some good responses to their final points, so thank you very much for doing that and thank you both reviewers for agreeing to look at the manuscript a second time. However I do want to ask you to consider further a final point from reviewer 2 because it seems important to me to at least understand what is happening in the model - or at the very least discuss why at this time it cannot be explained but should in some way be noted - i.e. the link between the modelled small scale variability and actual model representation and driving data.... I do not think your response to this comment below from the reviewer really gets to this point or has changed the manuscript to reflect on this small scale variability in CROCUS snow depth output:
- Variability of snow accumulation
The new figure 13 added to the manuscript is quite interesting and illustrates well the impact of blowing snow sublimation on the simulated snow depth at the glacier scale. However, it also raises a question which is not answered by the authors. Figure 11 shows a clear difference between Noah-MP and Crocus in terms of pixel-to pixel variability of simulated snow depth in 2017 and 2018. Figure 13 (left) shows that the simulated snow depth also presents this pixel-to pixel variability (alternance of orange and yellow/green colors) when the blowing snow sublimation is not activated. This variability is at sub-kilometer scale. In these experiments, Crocus at 100 m is driven by bilinearly interpolated smooth atmospheric forcing obtained from WRF at 1-km grid spacing. In addition, Crocus does not account for lateral-snow redistribution that could create small-scale variability of snow accumulation. Therefore, the author should better explain which processes are generating this small-scale variability in the model. Does it result from the implementation of Crocus in WRH-Hydro? It seems the blowing snow sublimation is not the explanation. Or maybe, it is just a visual effect of the plotting library.
I agree with this comment. This is an issue that is under investigation and my suspicion is that some error constraints in the model had to be relaxed in the current version when implemented into WRF-Hydro. Though this is something that should be looked into, the overall conclusion in the manuscript does not change.
-
I would be grateful of any further clarification (or notification) that you can add to the paper, best wishes, Jim Freer

Dear Authors, thank you for this final clarification of Figures 11 and 13. To me that is an acceptable change and I agree your general conclusions are not changed by it. I am very happy to conclude the reviewing of this manuscript and move to publication. Thank you very much for publishing your research in HESS and thank you to the reviewers for doing a great job on evaluating the paper, best wishes, Jim Freer (Editor of HESS)