Historical Trends and Projections of Snow Cover over the High Arctic: A Review
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Comments/suggestions are in the attachment.
Thank you for the nice work.
Comments for author File: 
Comments.pdf
Author Response
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Author Response File: 
Author Response.docx
Reviewer 2 Report
This review paper analyses the historical and potential future dynamic of snow cover over the High Arctic. The subject is of potential interest for the Water readership and the manuscript is well written and easy to read and follow. Nevertheless, in my opinion, the manuscript needs to address properly some issues to be published.
- INTRODUCTION:
The introduction has to be improved. The authors should make an effort to clarify the novelty and the relevance of the paper. They should include a more clear definition of the knowledge gaps, indicating the main novelties of this work.
- Projected snow cover conditions in the High Arctic
Taking into account that the paper analyses future projections, I think that an explanation about how we can assess the impacts of potential future climate change scenarios on snow cover variables. The authors (line 79-80) only mention that the most common approach to assess them is to use land surface models, but there are also other approaches, as for example those defined by applying machine learning techniques (see Collados-Lara et al., 2017).
(line 79-80). Future snow cover trends are usually assessed by using land surface models of different complexities, forced by climate change scenarios at different scale from global scale to catchment scale.
- Discussion and conclusion
I would include a subsection “assumption and limitations” to summarise the hypothesis, robustness and uncertainty of the information employed in this paper, especially with respect to the future projection.
Finally, with respect to the references, more than 2/3 of them are over 10 years old. I wold suggest to include some more recent publications.
REFERENCES:
Pardo-Iguzquiza, E., Collados-Lara, A.J., Pulido-Velazquez, D., 2017. Estimation of the spatiotemporal dynamics of snow cover area by using cellular automata models. Journal of Hydrology 550: 230–238. 10.1016/j.jhydrol.2017.04.058.
Author Response
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Author Response File: Author Response.docx
Reviewer 3 Report
Overall, this is a strong compilation and valuable contribution. I am in support of publishing with some changes addressed below. I would especially like to see more attention to all of the info in figures, consider acknowledging all the data contributors, and a little more synthesis.
Would be nice to see a summary of the time period and number of datasets included in the review as part of the abstract. See also comment below about acknowledgements.
This is a review paper focusing on breaking out the high arctic (HA) , differentiated from entire arctic or entire northern hemisphere. (and do they also compare? Are the results different?). They do not assess the HA compared to the Arctic or NHemisphere, but they do show results from a much broader area than the HA in the figures.
“The main objective of this review was thus to review the historical trends and future projections in snow cover characteristics in the HA region.”
Suggested changes moderate/major ones, minor suggestions at end
Section 2/table 1. Talk about contents of table in the same order as the table? Get table onto one page. Maybe it comes later, but a table like this could also be used to summarize the changes in time and space. Tables throughout review paper showing decadal trends for different regions and papers are very informative and pack a lot of information. Different styles of figures for different examples make it hard to compare and think about the degree to which the changes are occurring in parallel or opposite or unrelated.
All the tables, the arrow color and direction means what? Not explained in figure caption – would be good to show that bold/dark color means (significant?) and arrow means increasing etc. What are the colors and if it’s on an angle?
Table 3, what are the numbers? Tie figure info to text.
Consider adding a figure that compares each of the changes/trajectories for each decade or regionally as a synthesis. (by region, rather than by snow cover assessment).
I’m finding it confusing how many color changes there are in different figures (first blue to red, then yellow to red/orange). Is this a past/future way of displaying? I’m wondering if it would make sense to separate the past (observations) from the future (models) as two adjacent papers.
When you combine the results from different studies, how are you accounting for their different methodologies or time windows? This should be discussed. Even if you just use what they present, that variation adds a layer of complexity that should be acknowledged, or maybe documented in a supplement.
Line 237 add something about different types of snow cover conditions (there’s no actual info in table 1, just a list)
Consider acknowledging all of the authors whose work is reproduced here, either as authors or as acknowledgements. Also, no author contributions or acknowledgments are included in this submission.
I don’t have this challenge, and I’m not sure how to assess the figures, but it would be good if authors consider the extent to which a colorblind person can differentiate colors. I know this is an issue with shading and some color combos.
Minor suggestions
Figure 1 the background satellite image for all the non high arctic areas in superfluous. Could be a simpler map with just outlines. Also fine as is. I think it would also be beneficial to include Latitude/Longitude graticules
Misspelling of “arctic” (Artic) on page 2
Author Response
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Author Response File: Author Response.docx
Round 2
Reviewer 2 Report
The authors have properly addressed my comments. I wold suggest to publish it in present form.
