Following the receipt of two reviews and a short comment, I am now able to reach a decision on this paper. Both reviewers agreed that the paper contains interesting data that should be published, but had reservations in particular about the importance of section 3.3 on the effects of the eddies. I agree with them on this, and have some suggestions for improvements.

I think that if you want to use the AVISO data, from which most of the information of the eddy field is derived, then you need to at least point out the deficiencies as detailed by reviewer #2 in section 2.2. I am also not very enthusiastic about some of the description in section 3.3; I don’t see any sign in Fig. 7, for example, of eddies that are supposed to exist near 13°, 17° or 26°N, even though this has been reported by others, but there does seem to be a small increase near 15°N in this figure. So I think this section could be shortened and made less important.

You discuss the MLD climatology in Fig. 3, and stress the importance of the winter minima near 17°N and 25°N. However, from Fig. S3, January showed the fewest samples, so are these minima really significant given that you have 29 latitudinal bands of 0.5° each?

I also had some problems with section 3.2, particularly the relationships between the MLD and the forcing functions shown in Fig. 6. In your response to reviewer #2, you said that you have tested these relationships statistically and that they are all significant, yet you don’t say this in the paper. So say so, otherwise they are just wiggles in the data.

Finally, in section 3.4, you should reference some of the work in similar areas such as the Gulf of Tehuantepec, where strong winds coming through mountain passes are known to affect mixing.

I will be happy to take another look at the paper if you can make these changes.


I have also some suggestions for improving and simplifying the English. The final paper will be proof-read by the publishers before publication, so I am concentrating on areas where I think the most help is needed.

Lines 34-37 – suggest you rewrite as: “The Red Sea is an important intermediate water formation region in the world ocean. Red Sea Outflow Water (RSOW), formed mainly due to open-ocean convection in the northern Red Sea (Sofianos and Johns, 2002), propagates through Bab-el-Mandab to the Gulf of Aden (A&S 2007) and later spreads to the Indian Ocean. Its signature reaches…..”

Lines 49-50 – suggest “The Red Sea has been investigated for many years with an emphasis on its different physical features, but there has been no detailed investigation on MLD variability, apart from a few studies addressing the hydrography….”

Line 64: End the sentence after “is the main source.” and delete “with larger number of profiles.”

Lines 125-127 – delete the last sentence of this paragraph (“This method first identifies….”) as it merely repeats what you have said already.

Lines 162-163 – suggest you talk about the region between 14°-21°N as a whole, rather than splitting it up (see my comment about MLD climatology above). Is a change from 48+/- 9 to 44 +/- 14 really significant? Should the reference in line 162 be to Yao et al 2014b?

Thank you for making these latest changes to the manuscript. I believe it is now suitable for publication, subject to proof-reading by the editorial staff.