Dear Authors,

Many thanks for your thorough responses to the reviewers' comments. Both reviewers were positive and I am keen to see you revise the manuscript along the lines you have outlined, providing a point-by-point response to show how you've changed the manuscript. Both reviewers highlighted a lack of clarity generally, particularly in the methods. Can I urge you to thoroughly re-read your manuscript and edit the core messages for clarity. Certainly adding details of the sigmoid fitting is likely to help the reader, I agree. In addition, I think R1 is right to ask about albedo and the manuscript would benefit from explaining your choice to use snow depth as other readers may have similar questions.

Best wishes,

Martin

Dear Authors,

Referee #1 has now re-reviewed your changes and is happy with the scientific revisions. However, they again highlight (as Referee #2 also did) that this manuscript is not up to scratch in terms of readability. I am willing to accept this manuscript subject to the authors reading over the manuscript and making a significant effort to check the English for the final version.

Just to illustrate the point, here are some suggested edits for the Abstract

Abstract
Line 9: The surface albedo time series, CLARA-A2 SAL, was used
Line 11-12: In addition, the melt onset from JSBACH was compared with the timing of green-up estimated from MODIS data.
Line 12: Similarly, the end of snow melt predicted by JSBACH was compared with ...
Line 14-onwards: "It was found that 15 the albedo threshold 20 % of the ..." makes no sense.
Line 16: See above.
Line 17: In two northern vegetation map areas (vague), a clear trend towards an earlier snow melt onset ...
Line 20: "The increased stem volume explained the trend." - this is not a complete sentence, you need further details.

There are 9 authors on this paper, so if you all re-read the manuscript once more, I'm confident that you will end up with a final version that is publishable.

Best wishes,

Martin