We thank the reviewer for their critical reading of and commentary on our manuscript. Below the reviewer’s comments our responses are shown in bold.

This paper reports the results of a study of high-latitude ionospheric electrodynamics in both the Northern and Southern hemispheres to examine whether or not the patterns have mirror symmetry under reversal of sign changes in dipole tilt angle and IMF B_y component. It employs a model of the electric fields developed from newly available Swarm electric field measurements (thru spring of 2023) combined with the existing AMPS models of magnetic perturbations and currents. The results show that, with minor differences, the mirror symmetry holds.  Even more significant is that maps of the ionospheric Hall and Pedersen conductances are derived. 

The writing is of excellent quality, with no errors detected.  One major fault , easily corrected, is that Supporting Information (SI) with figures S1 through S6, that are mentioned in the text, are not provided.

• Thank you (and the other reviewers) for pointing out that we failed to include these figures, we will be sure to include them as part of resubmission.

The important conductance results don't seem to be given the attention that is deserved in the title and abstract. This paper might be missed by some researchers who are interested in these conductance values.  It also would be useful if there was a way to distribute maps of the conductances in numerical form for a wide range of solar wind, IMF, and tilt angles. 

• We agree with the referee that the conductance maps are likely the most important result of this paper.
  
  
  
  We have attempted to make conductance values easy to access by releasing an open-source front-end for the Swipe model (written in Python) complete with examples and code to reproduce all figures shown in the manuscript. Additionally, encouraged by this comment from the reviewer, we have announced the release of the model on many of our community’s mailing lists (AGU SPA, CEDAR, and European Heliophysics). We nevertheless agree with the reviewer that it would be ideal to find a way to make the conductance maps even more accessible, and we are at present working on developing a web interface that would allow one to easily export conductance values to an ASCII or .csv file.
  
  
  
  For now, we wish to point out that the Swipe model may be run directly from ESA’s VirES platform without needing to install or run Python on one’s machine. (Making an account is free, and examples of running the Swipe model are given here: https://notebooks.vires.services/notebooks/07c1_sw-pyswipe )

While it may be beyond the scope of this paper (and page limits) it would be useful to see how the models perform for IMF magnitudes up to 15 nT and higher, even though there is little IMF data in that range. 

• This is a very good suggestion. One of our contractual obligations with ESA is to produce a “validation report” of the Swipe model consisting of a detailed comparison with many other models, including the Weimer model. This validation report addresses the very large storm that was the subject of the Rastätter et al (2016) Poynting flux challenge paper, and shows how the Swipe model performs for large IMF magnitudes. The results are very interesting in our opinion, but are too large for inclusion as part of the peer-reviewed manuscript. During resubmission we will therefore either (i) include this validation report as supporting information, or (ii) include a link to the ESA website where a draft version of the report is located (https://earth.esa.int/eogateway/documents/d/earth-online/swarm-swipe-validation-report ).

We thank the reviewer for their careful reading of our manuscript and their comments and suggestions. Below the reviewer’s comments our responses are shown in boldface.

1. General Comments
   
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The paper presents comprehensive data sets of electrodynamic parameters obtained by in-situ observations onboard nearly circular, polar-orbiting LEO satellites in the upper ionosphere. The focus of this challenging study is on the interhemispheric differences between mirror-symmetric patterns of electrodynamic parameters obtained at high geomagnetic latitudes. The mirror symmetry between hemispheres is defined here with respect to opposite signs in both dipole tilt and IMF By component in GSM coordinates.

Novel empirical models of both ionospheric drift and currents are presented, which are based on consistent building principles and measurements from similar satellites: CHAMP and Swarm data for the empirical current's models AMPS, and newly TII observations of the Swarm satellites for the high-latitude ionospheric drift model called Hi-C.

Based on these empirical models, which are independently developed for both hemispheres, a series of further patterns of various electrodynamic parameters are revealed with their variations with respect to season (tilt angle) and IMF clock angle in the By/Bz plane of GSM coordinates. These parameters comprise the electromagnetic work as well as Hall and Petersen conductances, deduced provided that the neutral wind at high latitudes can be considered as corotating with the Earth.

The manuscript is of good quality, well written and organized and has a plenty of Figures, which illustrate the physics of ionospheric electrodynamics and its degree of interhemispheric symmetry optimally. The compilation of formulas is also notably (37) and gives the manuscript partly the character of a good review paper on empirical modeling.

1. Specific Comments
   
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The comparison between the cross-polar cap potential (CPCP) values of various data sets with the empirical model Hi-C of the Swarm satellites in Fig. 5 is quite illuminating. The interhemispheric ratio of the Hi-C model is contrary to both PRO2 and FH15, while the CS10 model corresponds partly to the present study, though with a different clock angle dependence. For purely southward Bz, the CS10 is in favour of the PR02 and FH15 models, while the NH/SH ratio for the other IMF orientations is similar to the Hi-C findings.

The IMF dependence of the CS10 model is hence quite variable with respect to the other data sets. I think that this is due to the finite latitudinal extent of the CS10 SuperDARN network at that time. It would be of interest to know, how the pattern of interhemispheric ratio looks like with the present-day, more extented SuperDARN network. I'm not aware of any study in this regard.

• We agree that this would be interesting to know. We, like the reviewer, are not aware of any recent SuperDARN-based study that examines interhemispheric CPCP ratios.

The results of this Hi-C study suggest, that the PR02 and FH15 models might feature some seasonal biases toward a preference of local winter patterns.  The highly elliptical orbit of the Cluster satellites might indeed have generated some seasonal imbalance of the mapped high-latitude drift patterns.  This should be investigated independently. The short data set of PR02 was taken near equinox and disagrees therefore somehow with the present findings.

• We thank the reviewer for the very careful comparison with previous studies. We will revise the manuscript to include the observations made by the reviewer here.

In relation to Hall conductances (section 5.2, page 25), just at one place in line 469, the standard deviation of Hall conductances are mentioned. I wonder, where this pattern is shown in the manuscript or in some supplement materials? Unless I'm very much mistaken, standard deviations of any parameters are not shown nor discussed elsewere in the manuscipt.

• We realize that we did not make clear what was done here, thank you for pointing this out. In the revised manuscript we will revise the text as follows to clarify this point:

The standard deviation of Hall conductances for these θc orientations within this same region (18–6 MLT and -75° to -60° MLat) is likewise lowest during local winter and highest during local summer. We obtain the standard deviation by first calculating the Hall conductances at points on a spherical grid with spacing of approximately 0.24 MLT and 0.3° MLat; the standard deviation is then calculated from all points within this region at which the criteria (37) are met.

The notion regarding the role of neutral winds on line 532ff. is remarkable in my mind. However, the criteria given in Equation 37 alone is not sufficient to determine the locations, where the assumption that the neutral gas simply corotates with the Earth breakes down. I'm missing here a somehow better identification of those circumstances (IMF orientation, season), where "...  namely negative or unphysically large conductances and sharp conductance gradients..." (line 538) occur.

• This is a good point, and we agree that the criteria in Equation 37 are not entirely satisfactory. In light of the reviewer’s comment we propose to revise the text with something like the following:

The criteria in Equation 37 enforce the physical requirement that the height-integrated conductances be positive (note however that in a dusty plasma the Hall conductance may be negative; see, e.g., Shebanits et al, 2020, and references therein). They have nevertheless arisen heuristically in the course of this study as a means of screening out the negative or unphysically large conductances and sharp conductance gradients that otherwise appear. It would be greatly preferable to enforce positive conductances (i.e., physical consistency) as part of the model design, and to include relevant neutral wind measurements. Such improvements deserve attention in future studies.

1. Technical Corrections
   
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The manuscript is very well written with almost no misprints (the very few exceptions that I found are listed at the bottom). The Figures, however, could still be somehow improved in my mind (see remarks below).

In Section 5.2 (Hall conductance) and 5.3 (Pedersen conductance), reference is made to Supporting Information of Figs. (S1)-(S6), which I couldn't find in the Preprint community platform.

• We thank the reviewer (and the other reviewers) for pointing out that we failed to include these during submission. We will be sure to include them as part of our resubmission.

I like the idea of direct interhemispheric comparisons in one and the same plot by using isolines and colored contours simultaneously for the opposite hemispheres. A problem might arise from the fact that the Figure's legends in Figs. 2-4 and 6-8 show a continuous color bar, while the contours are discrete. This is made differently for Figs. 10-15.

• We chose to use continuous color bars for Figures 2–4 and 6–8 to allow for different contour spacing from panel to panel. Since the contour spacing is the same for all panels in Figures 10–15, we decided in these figures to use a discrete colorbar that indicates the contour spacing. We hope that the reviewer agrees that this was a sensible strategy.
  
  
  
  To make this clear for the reader, we will add the following text to the captions of Figures 10 and 13 in the revised manuscript:

In contrast to Figures 2–4 and 6–8, in this figure the contour spacing indicated by the colorbar is identical for all panels.

Yes, the potential range for the various panels in the Figs. 2-4 is quite dynamic and therefore also the potential steps are quite variable.  I agree that it is reasonable to keep the number of contours and contour lines small. However, it might be useful to indicate the common constant step sizes then for each panel individually within the inscription blocks.

• This is a good idea; we will modify Figures 2–4 and 6–8 and include the contour spacing as part of the inscription in each panel.

The inlets (or inscription blocks) of Figs. 2-4 and 6-8 provide parameter values of the Northern and Southern hemisphere with 1-2 digits, while the ratio of the value is given with three digits. This allows some space for speculations about the correct numbers as, e.g., for the upper left panel of Fig.7 with values for W_N and W_S between 6.4 and 7.6 GW. I think it would be better to provide about the same number of digits for the parameter values as for their ratio.

• This was an oversight on our part, and we agree with the reviewer’s suggestion. We will revise Figures 2–4 and 6–8 accordingly.

Line 197: just below eq. (15) after "with d1 and d2" I miss a verb or "as"

Line 438: parenthesis for the reference not needed here

Line 461: "Bz" is probably meant here instead of "By"

Line 585: one "in" should be deleted

Line 618: "HH" is probably "HT"(?)

• These typos will all be corrected as suggested in the revision.

Please find attached our reply to comments from the third reviewer.