Dear authors,
many thanks for a thorough revision of your paper.
I have only few last corrections that I detail below.
Thanks again for submitting your paper to our PAGE21 special issue.
Julia


Page 7:
- “frost”-enhanced JSBACH model (page 7)
I suggest to replace “frost” with permafrost or “freeze thaw”.

- http://arcticlcc.org/products/spatialdata/show/simulated-mean-annual-ground-temperature
Please provide a citation if available.

-"..respective GTN-P Thermal State of Permafrost (TSP) snapshot data has been dowloaded from the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC)…”
Please provide the link and potential citation.

- You are using °C and deg C, please unify throughout the paper

Page 10:
-“Under these climate conditions, it is raining more often a little bit and air temperature are not extreme resulting in more moist conditions for lichens and bryophytes, hence higher thermal diffusivity.”
Please correct sentence (air temperature is)

Page 11:
- The increasing differences in the variability of meteorological variables under conserved long-term averages leads
Please correct sentence (lead)

Page 12:
- “the direction of the conclusions are carefully inverted in this discussion section.”
Please rephrase, it is not clear what this sentence means (as already suggested by the reviewer).
Why is this text bolded and highlighted? I suggest to remove this format.

Page 22: Figure 4: Please correct format (a and b should be aligned)?
Page 23: Figure 6: Please align figures.

None of your figures have a- d labeling, but captions refer to a-d. Please add.


Page 14: Conclusion
-Overall, the soil temperature response to increasing climate variability and extreme event frequency (soil cooling) will be opposite to the response of soil temperature to gradually increasing air temperature (soil warming). This shows the importance of representing dynamically snow and lichen and bryophyte functions in Earth system models for projecting future permafrost soil states and land-atmosphere interactions, hence future climate.

I do not understand why these sentences are connected (“This shows..”). Please add an explanatory sentence connecting these two sentences.

Dear authors,
many thanks for the revised version of your paper.
I have only one final request:
Please add the labeling as part of your figures.
According to TC it is not possible to use the subfigure command to include panels. You can find the respective LaTeX instructions and figure preparation guidelines at https://www.the-cryosphere.net/for_authors/manuscript_preparation.html in sections "LaTeX instructions" and "Manuscript composition". Only one single figure file per figure can be includes and because of this the panel labelling should be part of the figure.

Many thanks,
Julia