In reply to Dr Davis et al.

Dear Editor,

We thank Drs Davis, Mortimer, and Spano for their positive feedback ¹ and constructive suggestions. We fully acknowledge their insights regarding the various factors influencing snow's water content and support their recommendation for standardizing the amount of melted water. This would indeed facilitate comparisons across studies and improve the reproducibility of results.

In our study, we standardized snow melting using a 5-L pot filled with snow. ² We chose snow melting over water boiling because it better reflects a critical emergency task. Additionally, we believed that melting snow would result in less glazing than boiling water. However, we agree that adjusting the snow weight to 1 kg could constitute an effective measure to eliminate this variable in future trials.

That said, we do not believe that the variation in water volume significantly contributed to the high variation in carbon monoxide (CO) levels between the snow caves. With the exception of one trial (E-2), we found that larger volumes of water increased trial duration proportionally, but they all reached a plateau in CO levels before the trial end. The variation in duration was mitigated by using a time-weighted average to compare CO levels across caves (Table 1 in our paper²).

Overall, while we agree with the authors’ points, we believe that further research focused on understanding the variables influencing CO levels during burner use in snow caves should be conducted in the most standardized manner possible. We welcome such efforts and look forward to future studies in this area.