Dear authors,

thank you for resubmitting your manuscript. I appreciate that you included more technical details on the instruments as the referees had requested. At this point, your manuscript requires minor revisions before reaching publication quality of a short note. Note that this is based on my own judgment as I deemed it unnecessary to contact the referees with the revised manuscript again.

I do ask you to respond to my comments below. Moreover, although the text is clearly written and easy to follow, there are several typographical and grammar mistakes, which is why I ask you to give it a thorough final read, ideally from a native English speaker.

Best,
Fabian Walter.


1. Citations: At various points in the manuscript you refer to typical seismic signatures of rock-fall and earth surface processes (e.g. Line 5 on Page 2 and Line 9 on Page 6). I suggest you give more references, as other research groups have specifically worked on compilations of such seismic signals:

Vouillamoz, N., Rothmund, S., & Joswig, M. (2018). Characterizing the complexity of microseismic signals at slow-moving clay-rich debris slides: the Super-Sauze (southeastern France) and Pechgrabe (Upper Austria) case studies. Earth Surface Dynamics, 6(2).

Hibert, C., Malet, J. P., Bourrier, F., Provost, F., Berger, F., Bornemann, P., ... & Mermin, E. (2017). Single-block rockfall dynamics inferred from seismic signal analysis. Earth Surface Dynamics, 5(2), 283-292.

Provost, F., Malet, J. P., Hibert, C., Helmstetter, A., Radiguet, M., Amitrano, D., ... & Lebourg, T. (2018). Towards a standard typology of endogenous landslide seismic sources. Earth Surface Dynamics, 6(4), 1059-1088.


2. PSD PDF’s in Figure 2: For the RS sensors you show very long periods (beyond a few seconds), where the sensor is no longer sensitive. This should be labeled at least. Moreover, there is a clear branching for RS-3. I assume that this is the cable car operation (which you mention in the text), which could significantly affect detectability of weak rock fall signals at this station. In the worst case this may cause spurious diurnal activity cycles interfering with natural process cycles (Figure S5). Please comment on this and the general comparison with FIESA. Also, please include a reference for the Peterson noise models mentioned in the caption of Figure 2.

Page 2, Line 2: The last sentence is unclear.
Page 3, Line 25-26: touch by hands greater than 50 milimeters is unclear.

Figure 5: Specify Butterworth filter (2nd order?)

Figure S4, left image: Please annotate or remove as it is hard to understand what you are showing (wheelbarrow?).

Figures S9.?: The zooms are very helpful, however, even within them it is hard to make out differences. Please add arrows that guide the reader’s eyes.

Details on NTP performancs: This is useful information. The plots, however, are enigmatic for someone who sees them for the first time. I understand that this is standard output and cannot be modified easily, so please provide more explanations.

Dear Andrea, Velio, Maud and Reto,
Thank you for working with AE Fabian Walter and his referees to improve your manuscript. I am happy to follow Fabian's advice to publish your study in its present form. However, I have two request.
1) The benchmarking of your instruments against permanent seismic stations is done in supplementary materials, and receives little attention in the main text. This is an important feature of your study, and other users of cheap sensors will want to know how well they perform. It would be good to give this some attention in the principal text of the publication, and to address this point also in your summary section at the end of the communication.
2) In reading through the manuscript, I spotted a number of minor typos and language errors. Please will you work with the Copernicus copy editors to bring the text up to publishable standard.
Thanks for submitting your work to ESurf. We trust that your paper will receive due attention.
Niels Hovius