You will know that you receiuved two very positive reviews. The reviewers liked the paper and found it well written. I think the only substantive point is about which reanalysis to use. I appreciate the points in your response, though set against that, a longer record that does not reliably reflect Antarctic climate is as useless (perhaps more so) than a record that covers too short a time period! Anyway, provided you discuss, as you have indicated, the shortcomings of ERA-20C, it will be acceptable.

Please therefore submit a revised paper. The revisions required are minor, and I will review them myself, and expect to be able to accept the paper soon after resubmission.

Thank you for answering the few comments of the reviewers. I am happy with this.

I have a couple of technical issues, mainly to do with clarifying figure captions. I am accepting the paper subjject to those corrections.

1. line 256, typo ,.
2. line 390 "a sites failure", I think the word "site" should be removed. Somehow it doesn't make sense anyway.
3. Fig 1. I am not sure I understand the red line in part b. If I look at the Antarctic Peninsula am I meant to assume that everything to the left of the line meets the criteria? Clearly this is not true as there are areas on both sides of the Peninsula below 1000 m but no red line delineating them on either side. Can you clarify this.
4. Same caption: fuchsia is rather a specialised colour name. I actually have no idea what I am looking for on the figure - is it what looks like white areas?. Please use something more obvious.
5. I don't understand the caption to Fig 5b, please clarify - do you mean its the same as 1b?