Dear authors:

Thank you very much for your interest in NHESS and your submission of manuscript “Glacier detachments and rock-ice avalanches in the Petra Pervogo range, Tajikistan (1973–2019)”.

I enjoyed reading your manuscript, and I very much agree with the reviewers that your manuscript is a valuable contribution to the literature in the emerging research field of glacier detachments. However, the reviewers also raise a few valid concerns about the biased dataset, the description of the methods, and conclusions about the influence of climate change, and the quality of the writing. While you describe your approach for addressing these concerns in your answers to the reviewer comments, it is difficult for me to judge whether your implementation is sufficient without explicitly seeing it. For future submissions, I recommend that you include relevant parts of the revised sections in your response to the reviewers to highlight how their concerns have been addressed more explicitly. This would make it much easier for me to assess the quality of your revision.

While most of your responses to the reviewer are straight forwards, I would like to comment on your response to the General Comment 3 of Review #1: “… but you cannot justify the conclusions you draw about temperature trends with an inventory that is likely biased by data availability/quality.”

While you explicitly state on line 325 (first paragraph of discussion) that your analysis provides insight about the influence of climate change on glacier detachments, you do not mention the topic again until the conclusion section (Line 415). Hence, the effect of climate change does not seem to be a major focus of your study. Furthermore, I agree with Reviewer #1 that the evidence presented in Section 4.5 does not seem convincing enough to make any meaningful conclusions given the bias of the available dataset and the fact that it seems purely based on a visual inspection of the data and not any rigorous analysis. In addition, it is unclear to me how the detrending of the temperature time series addresses the concern of the reviewer and/or strengthens your conclusion about the effect of climate change. So, given the biased dataset and the relatively weak analysis, I believe it would be best to simply describe the temperature ranges of a) the years with available data, and b) the years with observed glacier detachments and leave the reference to climate change.

I hope you find these comments useful, and I am looking forward to seeing your revised manuscript.

Pascal Haegeli
NHESS Editor
Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada

Dear authors:

I have now received a review of the revised version of your manuscript from one of the reviewers that had examined the initial submission. The reviewer concludes that the manuscript has improved substantially and makes a great contribution to the literature. I fully agree with this assessment, and I would congratulate you on a very nice paper.

In their careful review, the reviewer found a few typos and raised a concern about the generalizability of your statement about rock/ice avalanches not being sensitive to earthquakes (Line 339). I would appreciate of if you could address these concerns before submitting your final files.

Again, congratulations to the entire author team for great paper.

Best wishes
Pascal Haegeli
Associate Editor NHESS
Simon Fraser University, Vancouver BC, Canada