Dear Authors,

Thanks for the thorough revision of your paper and for taking into account or answering to the reviewer’s comments.

Based on your revised MS and your response, I have been convinced that:
(i) your GNSS dataset of East Antarctica is accurate enough to provide a new set of ICESat laser inter-campaign biases valid for this area.
(ii) Given that your study area is almost stable, you are in position to evaluate different DEMs even if their time stamp (not always clearly defined because they merged different missions/data) differ from your GNSS data.

Thus, I concur with your decision to keep these sections in your revised manuscript (MS) although two of the referees were not entirely convinced based on your submission.

I still have a few, generally minor, comments on the MS that you will find below. Page and line numbers correspond to the “tracked change” version of the MS that you added at the end of your response letter.

To ensure a prompt and easy handling of your revised paper, could you upload a (i) a rebuttal letter and (ii) a new track-changed version of the paper only showing the changes that will be done in this round of corrections?

Best regards,

Etienne Berthier

Table 1. last column of Table 1 (Icebridge) was not visible in the PDF uploaded in the system.

P7 (second to last line). Do the authors mean "during the processing"?

P8 L7. Horizontal (averaging) bar missing I think on top of RMSx

Figure 2. It would be good to remind in the legend the approximate time interval (range of years) over which these dh/dt were obtained.

Old section 3.2.1. it seems that this whole section has been removed. I did not find it in section 2.4 as suggested... But it is important to have a clear description of the cross-over method (and how it was applied here).

P19 L18. Was not it noted "b" earlier in the MS (P14 L21)? double check everywhere for consistency of notations.

Table 3 Delta_h in the table is not really clear. Was it defined earlier (at least in the legend of the table)?

P21 L11. Notation. Be consistent! Should be H_dot_b

P21. L22. parenthesis not needed

P23. L15. "and h_dot during the bias estimation" was not clear to me. Clarify.

Figure 9c. The turquoise line is hard to see (at least for me)

P27. L6. You could be more direct and tell that these biases explain an overestimation of the Antarctic mass loss by Zwally et al. (2015). As stated currently, this is as if there was a discrepancy but it was not resolved.

Thanks for your thorough final revision. It is my pleasure to accept your paper for publication in TC.

Just a very final suggestion for full clarity:

"This is very likely the cause for the significantly larger ice mass balance estimate from ICESat obtained by Zwally et al. (2015) compared to other authors (see Scambos and Shuman, 2016)."

could be changed to

"This is very likely the cause for the significantly larger (i.e. too positive) Antarctic ice sheet mass balance estimate from ICESat obtained by Zwally et al. (2015) compared to other authors (see Scambos and Shuman, 2016)."