I would like to thank the authors for modifying the document and addressing many of the recommended changes. The following minor changes were suggested during the final review of this document. With these changes, the document is recommended for publication.

Philip Marsh

Suggestion Details:

Line 28: Change “…, which both increased at a ….” to “…, both of which increased at a …”

Line 28-29: I would change “The modeled winter albedo decreased at more stations than where it increased.” To “Among the stations included, a decrease in the modeled winter albedo was more prevalent than an increase.”

Line 38: Change “…temperatures are warming much more than the global average…” to “…temperatures are increasing much more rapidly than the global average rate…”

Line 50: Change “…North American has shown…” to “…North America have shown…”

Line 68: The following sentence is not clear: “Using a number of climate models, the largest future decrease is in snow covered days, which is much more than maximum SWE (Brown and Mote, 2009).” Is this the most obvious change gleaned from looking at the simulations from numerous models, the most statistically significant change, or has some quantitative measure been calculated? I would reword to make the meaning clear.

Line 71: I would reword “Similarly, the snow albedo feedback is a concept used in climate models to define the atmospheric energy balance from the change in solar radiation due to the change in snowpack albedo (Qu and Hall, 2006).” As “Similarly, the snow albedo feedback is a concept used in climate models to define the sensitivity of the atmospheric energy balance to net solar radiation due to a change in snowpack albedo (Qu and Hall, 2006).”

Line 257: Change “…to better understand…” to “…to understand better…”.

Line 268: Would it be better to use the word “exhibit” or “demonstrate” than “illustrate”?

Line 303-308: It may be that these factors sometimes work together and sometimes at cross-purposes. A warmer winter may be likely to have a shorter snow-cover duration because of melt, or a longer snow-cover duration if there were increases in snowfall during what would normally be the colder winter periods. The ultimate effect of seeing more days with T>0°C is intuitively obvious, but frustrating to examine in a variable system. Just a comment. No change requested here.

Line 347-348: I suspect that the NIR albedo varies much less in the CLM, so your assumption of 0.2 while possibly problematic, is not quite as bad as the variation in visible albedo would suggest.

Line 355: Change “… 3 to 5 cm high allow it to be…” to “… 3 to 5 cm high which allows it to be…”.

Line 373: Change “…and model.” to “…and models”.