In the paper “Changes in Arctic sea ice result in increasing light transmittance and absorption” by Nicolaus et al. (Geophysical Research Letters, 39(24), L24501, doi:10.1029/2012GL053738, 2012), the presented data on solar surface irradiance are erroneous. In order to generate monthly means of the solar heat input into the Arctic Ocean, among others, the ERA interim (European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts) data set of solar surface irradiance was used. The original data set consists of eight time slices with integrated fluxes over 3 h each. But in the presented results, only the mean (not sum) of two slices (from 00:00 to 03:00 and from 12:00 to 15:00) was considered, resulting in too low fluxes, approx. by a factor of eight. As a consequence, two text passages (in paragraph 3.1 and 3.3) and three figures (Figure 4 of the main article and Figures S3 and S6 of the auxiliary material) contain too low fluxes. However, the main conclusions of the manuscript remain completely valid and unchanged, since those are only based on relative fluxes, which are not affected by this mistake.