The article deals with a subject of great interest in my opinion, both for the public and for snow and avalanche practitioners. It does so in a very structured way, providing new data that are treated with appropriate and rigorous statistical methods.

The methods used are explained at length, and these lead to clear results, from which important and well-justified conclusions are derived. The methods and techniques used would allow the study to be reproduced if this were of interest.

 Both the title and the abstract perfectly reflect the content of the article and are easy to understand. Formulae, symbols and abbreviations are correctly explained. The same applies to the references, which are well documented.

The article is well-structured and clear. As it deals with three different experiments, it is quite long, but this is justified. Most of the figures are easy to interpret, except for Figures 2 and 3, which are practically illegible due to the small size of the fonts and photos. We suggest increasing the size of the font and photos, at the cost of eliminating the "medium size" graphics, which are also not thoroughly worked into the text.

Overall, the article is written in clear, well-structured and simple English.

In our opinion the article can be published as is, but if you wish you can take into account the following comments:

- Line 114:  We find it more appropriate to speak of "public forecasting" than "regional forecasting".

- Line 121: We are a bit surprised to find 10 responses in Spain and not having known about this study before. Knowing which organizations in each country were surveyed would give information on the quality of the survey.

- Line 124: In Study 2 the sample of 9 people is obviously small. The uniform background of the respondents further weakens the results. The same happens in Study 3. The need to improve this with a larger sample could be pointed out in the conclusions.

- Line 138: Delete the first comma

- Line 190: Figure 1a, which does not exist, is cited.

- Figure 5: We are very surprised by the result shown in this figure, in which the destructive potential is the least valued of the factors. The possible causes of this anomaly are briefly discussed in the text.

- Figure A1 does not seem relevant to us

In any case, congratulations on the work done, it is excellent to us!

This is well excuted study yeielding important insight into an important topic. The article is well structured, clearly presented, and easy to follow.  I have little in the way of constructive feedback on the explanation of methods and results.  The article can be published as is, with some very minor text clean up such as Figure label corrections and extraneous commas. I've attached a commented pdf. 

I do suggest this article's main strength lies in Study 1 which captures a robust set of responses from professionals across a wide range of countries. This sample size allows for more significant statistical insight, and by itself makes for a strong paper.  The discusison of study 1 results describes some surprise that the destructive potential is not more heavily conisdered given that it is a principle criteria in both size scales used in the study.  This is only briefly touched on in the discussion and I suggest deserves a bit more attention.  I was a participant in this study, and as suggested, I believe the study design at least in part drove this outcome. The nature of the images preculudes the participant from anything better than rough guesses as destructive potential.  Several of the images do not have a reference for guaging destructive potential, and 8 of the 10 images are void of trees or vegetation which help to put scales in context.  This is not a criticism of the study, but would explain why destructive potential was not more frequently chose, as I recall responding much the same way.  This could be an area for future investigation using a wider array of imagery.

The article is quite long with the inclusion of Study 2 and 3.  While interesting, the very limited number of participants (including the authors) all with nearly identical training and background, and presumably from the same or similar organizations. This limits the import of the results.  I might suggest building on the results from Studies 2 and 3, expanding the outreach, and deferring publication of these findings for a future article. This would make the submission a clear focus on Study 1 and make the article less cumbersome.  

Lastly, I was curious reading the article that estimate the outline of the avalanche is covered nicely, but there is no mention of estimating the depth, particualrly of dry snow avalanches. As a practitioner, this is a critical for volume estimates.  I would love to see some discussion as to how this played into size estimations.  

Very well done study I think many will find enlightenting. Congratulations!