Dear Katherine Evans and co-workers,

I have now looked at your manuscript, the previous JAMES manuscript and your response to reviewers in details. It took me quite a bit of time since it may indeed be questioned whether there is enough new aspects to warrant publication in GMD, as highlighted by one of the reviewers. In the end, I think this is the case.

However, I still would like to have some small corrections & improvements to the manuscript regarding the data used. We try at GMD, as I am sure you are aware, to improve traceability of datasets and software.
In your current version this is a quote from your data access:

LIVVkit produce the validation output shown here. Refer to (Price et al., 2017), (Vizcaíno et al., 2013), and (Nöel et al., 2015) for instructions to procure the CISM-A, CESM, and RACMO simulation data we used as illustration.

From a quick reading, this does not provide any leads on what is the actual access policy of the datasets used.

Price et al. 2017:
The Community Ice Sheet Model code is available at
http://oceans11.lanl.gov/cism/index.html (Price et al., 2014;
Lipscomb et al., 2017). For the
Albany
momentum bal-
ance solver, please see the code availability statement
in Tezaur et al. (2015a). The raw ICESat and GRACE
data discussed above are available for download at http:
//nsidc.org/data/icesat/data.html and http://podaac.jpl.nasa.
gov/datasetlist?search=GRACE, respectively. The CmCt on-
line service is available at https://ggsghpcc.sgt-inc.com/
cmct/ and the CmCt source code will be made available
upon request. Model forcing and initial condition datasets
are available through direct contact with the respective au-
thors (see Sect. 2.3).
This does not discuss output datasets except for GRACE, but this is not the subject of the paper nor your reference.

Vizcaino 2013 does not have a data usage section, nor any license on use I could find. No access methodology either.

Nöel 2015 has no indication on data sharing or access.

Therefore and in short, you are indicating readers to look for papers where little is explained on how to access the data and nothing is written on the licensing.

This is not appropriate for GMD. I would like therefore an update of this with precise references to the datasets, licensing and access possibilities there.

Best wishes,
Didier Roche