Dear Drs. Schulte and Lee,

Thank you for the revised submission of your manuscript. I think you have answered the questions and comments by the referees satisfactorily and the manuscript has much improved based on these comments. There are a few things left, which I have listed below. Please account for these in the final version for submission.

My first comment concerns a previous comment by referee #2 which I encourage you to consider again and possibly use in the final version of your manuscript:
COMMENT by Referee #2
In this paper, the authors performed a statistical analysis to show that Long Island Sound (LIS) surface temperature is linked to mid-tropospheric geopotential height difference between the US east coast and Alaska, which is referred to as ridge-trough dipole in this study. By performing composite analysis, they further argue that the dipole is forced by sea surface temperature anomalies in the central equatorial Pacific. From Figure 2, it is quite clear that LIS surface temperature is determined by the meridional shift of the atmospheric jet and the associated winter storm track across the US east coast. For instance, a northward shift of the storm track will warm up the subtropical North Atlantic and the mid-Atlantic bight, and cool the subpolar North Atlantic. The associated increase in the subtropical high will further increase the trade wind cooling the tropical North Atlantic. This is a well-known process, also known as North Atlantic tripole SST mode, which can be well observed in Figures 7 and 8. The North Atlantic tripole SST mode can be triggered by NAO, ENSO teleconnection and PNA, which is also very well known (e.g., Deser & Blackmon, 1993). Therefore, it is difficult for me to justify the publication of this manuscript in Ocean Science.
YOUR ANSWER: Although the authors do see some evidence for the tripole mode in Figures 7 and 8, the signal is not particularly robust because the composite means are mainly statistically significant along the east coast of the United States. The lack of relationship with the tripole mode is consistent with how LIS temperature anomalies are not strongly linked to the NAO and PNA patterns that have been identified in previous work as excitation mechanisms for the tripole mode. That lack of relationship between LIS temperature anomalies and the tripole SST mode were confirmed by correlating LIS temperature anomalies with SSTs across the North Atlantic. It was found that LIS temperature anomalies are only significantly correlated with Atlantic SSTs along the east coast US and not across other regions where the tripole mode centers are locate (please see Figure 3c in the revised manuscript). Thus, the LIS mode is new and largely different from the tripole mode identified in previous work.
EDITOR: Did you incorporate this discussion or parts of it into the manuscript? It is quite helpful to the readers to see that other processes come into question, but are not the main causes of changes in LIS.

P1, L6 Department (typo)
P1, L13 determined (instead of measured)?

P4, L9 Tremblay (typo)
P4, L26 Administration

P11, L3 delete: perhaps
P11, L9 … play a crucial role in the occurrence of …

P19, L21 Please change the header to “Conclusions”. This section as it is, is clearly a Conclusions section only, no Discussion.

P19, L23-24 “The spatial characteristics of the SST patterns was demonstrated to depend on the phase of the LIS events.” I think this is the other way around.

References
Please check all references thoroughly as there are errors in text, journals and format. Below is a list of comments, which is, however, not complete:
P23, L9 A linkage (blank)
P23, L11 Please use initials for authors
Compo et al: List all authors
Di Lorenzo, E., and Coauthors: List all authors
P23, L26 pages not complete
P23, L31, 32 Abbreviation of the journal should be: B AM METEOROL SOC (according to Web of Knowledge)
P25 Kalnay, E., and Coauthors: List all authors
P26 Pershing, A. J., and Co-authours: List all authors
P26 Schulte, J. A. and S. Lee, 2017 is incomplete
P27, L19 Journal should be: Geophys. Res. Letters

Thank you and best wishes
Mario Hoppema