Dear Authors
Thank-you for your much-revised manuscript. I intend to send it back to the two referees who were willing to review a revised manuscript. However, I have many detailed comments of my own (see below), generally intended to make it clearer for the reader. I think these are best attended to before the referees review it.
Yours sincerely
John Huthnance (editor)


Page 1
Line 2. “then completed” -> “complemented”?
Line 10. “which” -> “as” (only use “which” immediately after the object it refers to)
Line 11. Omit “that it offers”

Line 17. “should be considered with attention” -> “merits attention”?
Lines 19-20. “a decrease in freshwater content of about 180km^3” – from when to when?

Page 2
Line 2. “500 km^3” – over what time period? Are these freshwater volumes on the basis of salinity = 0?
Lines 3-4. “income in” -> “coming into”
Lines 8-9. “The shelf area of the Laptev and the East-Siberian was described” -> “The Laptev Sea and East-Siberian shelf areas were described”
Line 10. “the freshwater income” -> “the incoming freshwater”
Line 21. “falls under an additional impact” -> “comes under the additional influence”
Line 29. “via” needs to be replaced by some characteristic of the vertical distribution of energy that shows the extent of the mixed layer.
Lines 30-31. “open water or under the ice, the Barents Sea, the East-Siberian Sea or the central Arctic”; this list is only useful if you associate different MLD with each region.

Page 3
Line 7. “water, which” -> “water; 34.80”
Line 10. “being” -> “to be”
Line 15. “layer between” -> “layer to be between” or “layer as between”
Line 18. Omit “The” at start.
Line 29. Omit first “the”.
Line 33. “and” -> “over a”?

Page 4
Line 1. “net radiative balance at the sea surface changes from 100W/m^2” – in which direction is the 100W/m^2 ?
Lines 3-12. This is the place (end of Introduction) to state clearly what your paper will do to improve our knowledge and understanding. That statement is rather hidden by, and mixed up with, too much information about how you will do it. Such information can be in section 2.
Line 18. Omit “both,”

Page 5 line 6. Omit “further on”?

Page 6 line 4. “The threshold chosen for practical density gradient was 0.3 degree per 1 m” does not read sensibly. “0.3 degree per 1 m” relates to temperature (your text says so) so how does the density relate to the threshold?

Page 6 bottom – page 7 top. “the upper 12 m of the surface layer was homogeneous, and our CTD and TSG measurements can be used for the validation of satellite data.” I think 12m homogeneous layer validates the TSG at 6.5m (a referee question) but the satellite data may have a skin effect and/or diurnal variation depending on the weather (you discuss this on pages 9-10).

Page 7
Line 3. “. . Below 40m depth the temperature . .”. It may be better to give the temperature at 30m depth; at present you describe the temperature as “0.5◦C . . at 5 m . . slightly rising to -1 ◦C”
Line 5. Omit “up”
Line 20. “Since” -> “After”
Line 23. “Siberian great” -> “large Siberian”
Line 25. “moment” -> “time”.
Line 29. “listed below products” -> “products listed below”

Page 8
Line 4. “provide” -> “providing”
Line 7. “uses” -> “used”
Lines 18 and 19. “collocated” or “co-located”? I think maybe “collocated” in line 18 (also line 21 and page 9 line 2) but “co-located” in line 19. It is not clear to me that you “collocated” SST DMI (line 19 and figure 4 caption).

Page 10
Line 25. “embarking” -> “carrying”?
Line 32 to page 11 top line. This sentence is hard to read. You might move all the definitions / explanations to the end.

Page 11.
Line 4. “at attempting to retrieve” -> “at retrieving”. [“aims . . at attempting” is duplication.]
Line 16. “weighted by the estimated error” suggests more weight is given to values with larger estimated error. Maybe “weighted by comparison with the estimated error” or “weighted relative to the estimated error”?
Lines 21, 22. I missed definition of “ACARD” that would give meaning to a value 45. Perhaps a reference would be best.
Line 32 and figure 5 caption. I am not sure about “collocated SSS” (c.f. Page 8 comment above).

Page 13
Lines 4-5. “a higher confidence” -> “confidence”? [“higher” implies comparison – with what?]
Line 15. “polynya” (spelling)
Line 16. “south of 79◦N” (assuming you mean that it was ice-free at 78◦N, for example).

Page 14.
Equations (1). For Ekman transports I think you should not divide by Ekman depth. The division gives a velocity. Also I think your w_ekm has the wrong dimensions.
Line 28. I think “freshwater” -> “water” twice (you give the salinity values anyway and it is not actually “fresh”; maybe “fresher”?).

Page 15.
Figure 6b black line needs explanation.
Line 7. “sensibility” -> “sensitivity”?

Page 17 line 3. Omit “back” or replace with a word giving extra meaning.

Page 18
Table 1 caption. “ans” -> “and”; “explication” -> “explanation”
Line 18. “in a previous section” is too vague; give the section number.

Page 19 Figure 8. I do not see the red freezing line mentioned in the caption.

Page 21
Figure 10 caption line 2. Better “Small coloured circles”.
Line 3. Omit “,”

Page 23
Figure 12. I rather agree with referee 1 that these Hovmoeller plots would be better with time as the “y” axis and (increasing) latitude as the “x” axis.
Lines 2-4. I think referee 2 had questions about wind direction and mixing. Your point about an error in DMI SST avoids the need to answer those questions but it is not clear why “an error in DMI SST product” should be “due to . . strong winds”
Line 3. Omit “on”.
Line 7. “depression” -> “cyclone”?

Page 24
Line 1. Please explain what “frontal area” you refer to.
Lines 4-5. “Higher values . . are expected . . as this is an area exposed to rapid changes.” Please explain.

Page 25
Lines 13-14. “presented below oceanographic sections” -> “oceanographic sections presented below”
Lines 19-20. Move “(20-30m)” to after “similar” in line 19.
Line 21. “which is clearly seen in temperature signal” -> “as is clearly seen in the temperature”
Line 25. “deepens” -> “moves deeper”

Page 26 line 10. “first (surface)” -> “surface”?

Page 27.
Line 4. “sea edge very slowly” looks like a mistake. Or it needs explaining!
Line 12. “In a previous study on” -> “A previous study in”

Page 28
Lines 3-4. “The cross-validation of satellite DMI SST and SMOS SSS "A" estimates is done with rare in this region continuous TSG measurements and CTD data. “ I think you want “Satellite DMI SST and SMOS SSS "A" estimates are cross-validated with continuous TSG measurements and CTD data (rarely done in this region).”
Line 8. “. . and to discuss . .”
Line 12. I don’t understand “and diminishes”
Line 14. “which” -> “as”

Page 29
Line 3. “is to start in” -> “starts at”?
Line 4. “will be finished by November”? The surface may be completely covered by ice but surely the ice will continue forming under the surface through the winter?
Lines 18-19. “Ekman depth is controlled only by the Coriolis parameter f”? Also by viscosity!

Page 30
Line 30. “precised” -> “stated”? “Rossby” (spelling)
Line 31. “altimeter along-track resolution of 300 m” seems very fine. Some km “footprint”?
Lines 31-32. “at the shallowest areas the highest eddy kinetic energy was reported in the same study.” -> “the same study reported largest eddy kinetic energy in the shallowest areas”?

Page 31 line 4. “thank for” – thank who?

Dear Authors
Thank-you again for your revised manuscript. I am sorry for the delay in obtaining reviews and getting them on the Editorial system. Both reviews raise serious comments of presentation and there are a few serious aspects of science also for you to address – statistics of results, Ekman transports. I am copying these comments below for your convenience (plus a couple of mine at the end). These comments will be public if or when your manuscript is published, so readers will be able to see whether you have answered them satisfactorily. I may want to send it back to the reviewers again. Please also be sure that your text is clear (Reviewer 4 makes many points). A final manuscript will be copy-edited, but the copy-editor cannot be expected to guess what you mean.
Yours sincerely
John Huthnance (editor)


Reviewer 1
Second review of Tarasenko et al., Surface waters properties in the Laptev and the East-Siberian Seas in summer 2018 from in situ and satellite data, submitted to Ocean Science.
In this second review, I refer back to my first review, and to the authors' responses to that review.
In the Overview, I noted that the Introduction section and the Discussion and Conclusions section needed to be improved. The Introduction is now much better, but there is still an important missing point. The Arctic stores, imports and exports huge volumes of freshwater (as the authors note), but when concentrating on the shallow Siberian shelf seas, they make no comment about their role as conduits for freshwater. Their importance is more that the large river runoff volumes must cross the shelf seas before they reach the Beaufort Gyre / Canadian Basin (and find their eventual fate through export out of the Arctic). How do these freshwaters cross the shelf seas to the deep basins? Our understanding of processes / dynamics / timescales is incomplete, and this is where Armitage (2016) is helpful - it is not just about the small downwards storage trend in the shelf seas, it is also about comparisons of storage variability between deep and shallow basis. The authors should also consider Schlosser et al. (DSR I, 1994) "Arctic river runoff: mean residence times on the shelf and in the halocline". Has this excellent work been updated? In any event, they show from geochemical measurements that river waters spend two or three years in the shelf seas before leaving offshore. How does this fundamental observation reflect on the authors' findings? Regarding the Discussion and Conclusions - I am mainly happy with the revised text but see my point 10 below for a specific (continuing) problem.

I next consider the authors' replies to my specific points.
1, 2, 3, 4, 5. OK, thanks.

6. You state in section 2.2.3 (line 19 in v5) that the SMOS spatial resolution is about 50 km, so that oversampling at 15 km means that each 50 x 50 km2 resolved area contains about ten 15 x 15 km2 points, and oversampling means that those ten points will contain noise around the "true" mean of the 50 km grid cell. So I repeat my question: how does this affect your statistics?

7. OK, thanks.

8. OK, I am happy with your explanation but you need to note in the relevant figure captions that the virtual transects are shown by the red lines.

9. OK, thanks.

10. No problems with Ekman transport, but the Ekman pumping calculation in shallow water is simply not valid. Just because you can solve an equation does not mean that use of the equation is valid. If this is at all unfamiliar, I recommend the nice online textbook by Robert Stewart of Texas A&M (search for "Stewart oceanography text book", it is available for free download) and look at the Ekman sections (in chapters 9, 12). The balance of operative processes is very different in shallow (tens or a few hundreds of metres) versus deep (thousands of metres) waters, which is why I suggested looking at the Lentz papers (JFM 2002, JPO 2004, and Moffat & Lentz, JPO 2012). I also recommend Whitney & Garvine (JGR 2005) as a nice illustration / application of the framework. They describe upwelling and downwelling response to winds and Ekman transports in shallow waters (including buoyant coastal currents). This would provide a credible framework to describe your observations, and not Ekman pumping. You do not necessarily need to do more analytical work, that is not what I am asking for. But you need to remove the Ekman pumping results from your figures, and then interpret the Ekman transports in shallow-water terms. For example, in your v5 figure 15 panel c, showing an east wind with offshore Ekman transport, that will induce downwelling at the coast and a consequent residual vertical circulation that draws water from offshore onto the shelf below the surface layer. Same figure panel f shows a south wind that induces a mainly along-shore Ekman transport that probably does not induce a residual vertical circulation. This style of interpretation would improve the Discussion and Conclusions.

11. This is an additional point. The manuscript should become publishable subject to the remaining problems being fixed, but the presentation of text in figures (mainly axis and contour labels) is poor. Text is often much too small for sensible legibility. Please check each figure, consider what size the text might appear on the printed page, and make it all a readable size.

Reviewer 4
Summary
In this paper, the authors use a combination of satellite and in-situ data to document the evolution of water masses in the Laptev and East Siberian Sea of the summer of 2018. The focus is on the surface layer, and in particular, water masses deriving from the Lena River and low salinity waters from the Kara Sea.
The authors make use of CTD transects undertaken in the ARKTIKA-2018 expedition to evaluate the accuracy of satellite SST and SSS products. For the latter, the authors themselves present a novel SSS product that they deem to be most appropriate for the geographical region under question. The authors argue that the match between the satellite products and the in situ data is sufficiently strong that the satellite products themselves can be used for much of the remaining analysis in the paper, in particular, defining separate water masses and tracing their evolution over the late summer 2018 period.
Using a TS framework to separate the water masses, the authors resolve spatial changes in the water masses over time. They also focus attention onto particular sections in order to make links between water mass changes and other processes: wind speed and the passing of cyclones.
The authors present geochemical analysis from the cruise transects that helps to verify the origins of the surface water masses between the tree end members: river water, sea ice melt, and marine water.
This paper is a useful documentation of the surface ocean in the Laptev and East Siberian Sea in the summer of 2018, and to that extent that the authors successfully make process-based findings, it has implications beyond the time frame during which the measurements were made.
The methods are mostly appropriate for the chosen questions, though I have some specific suggestions in terms of robustness of the evaluation of satellite data, and the means of comparison of certain physical data.
Novel oceanographic data and novel SSS satellite retrievals are presented, but it is not quite true that the presentation of water mass properties at a synoptic scale in this region of the Arctic is totally novel (see Osadchiev et al., 2020, Scientific Reports).
The significance of the work is largely in its implications for the usefulness of satellite SST and SSS in the Arctic, though in my view the authors have more work to do on that point.
The communication of the results and methods needs some improvement, both in text and figures.

Main points
Evaluation of satellite data.
The authors present co-located surface water (CTD and TSG) measurements and satellite data in scatter plots. The authors also provide a useful error frequency distribution, from which they show that the observed errors are more substantial than that provided by the satellite product (for both SST and SSS). After discussing the comparison to in situ data, the authors simply resolve that the two products agree well with the in situ data, and use this as support for using the products for the following analyses. A more robust justification is required, especially given that the differences to the in situ data are not insignificant.
Can the authors use existing conventions in the literature for what constitutes a “good agreement”? Another approach would be to think about how sensitive the key findings are to random error and biases in the satellite data. Can the authors comment on what threshold of random error or bias the data must be below in order for the results to be robust? If it can be demonstrated that the results are not sensitive to the present level of error in the measurements, that would be more convincing evidence to the reader that the data are appropriate to be used.
Surface water-mass TS analysis
It is inevitable that the separation of water masses into distinct groups will be based on somewhat arbitrary salinity and temperature values. However, the authors need to do a bit more to explain to the reader why they have chose the definitions they have, and how sensitive their results are to these choices.
It is somewhat concerning that the range of values displayed by the satellite measurements vastly exceeds that of the in situ data. The authors need to explain to what extent this is due to the in situ data being fewer and spatially limited, and to what extent it is due to error in the satellite data. It is a concern that the classification might be based on erroneous values; it appears that according to the in situ measurements, water-masses 1 and 3 were not sampled. Comparison of the cruise track and Figure 9 indicates that the water mass 1 might never have been properly sampled by the CTD measurements, while it is a surprise that watermass 3 is never sampled in the MIZ on sections 7 and 8.
Can the authors put the cruise sections in context of the identified water masses?

Minor points
P1L20 - make it clear exactly what region was affected by this freshwater decrease
P2L13 - describe what these studies contributed. This would also give the reader some background into what is understood already about the region.
P2L14 - Statement should be revised in light of Osadchiev et al. 2020
Fig. 1 - Mark rivers clearly. Dotted lines are used for ice edge, bathymetry and grid markings; this is a bit hard on the eyes. Consider changing some (or all) of these to light, solid lines. Consider choosing a different colour for text that refers to different types of features (eg. rivers in blue, straits in red…)
P5L7 - what exactly is the standard error in this context?
P6L1 - units can be given for the standard deviations
P7L6 - what depth does the satellite sample? This is clearly relevant in the discussion here and would be worth stating explicitly.
P7L8 - given that the median profile portrays a picture of the water column that is not representative of any given profile, I am not sure it is worth describing it here as if it is physical. For instance, the smoothness of the thermo-/halocline is an artefact of averaging many profiles with sharper halo-/thermoclines at different depths.
P7L14 - use ‘is composed of’ instead of ‘composite’ (composite suggests another meaning)
P8L12 - meaning of statement in parentheses is unclear
Fig. 4 - Contour plot looks a bit messy - consider pixel plot without contours. Fig. 4c does clearly show coherent groupings with distinct biases in the satellite data (e.g. measurements from days 45-50 are consistently too cold in satellite data, while in days 25-30 the satellite data are too warm)
P9L6 - is this all data or just those from CTD casts where the mixed layer depth is below 7 m?
P10L21 - ‘potential cloudiness’ is a bit confusing for a specific date that has already passed. Was it partially cloudy?
P10L33 - justification required, as suggested above
P11L7 - provide a reference for this statement? It is not obvious to the reader that this would be the case, as density of measurements and degraded sensitivity are not obviously compensating.
P11L20 - explicitly state the implications of oversampling for interpretation of the results
P11L26 - is this an innovation or a convention? Provide a reference if a convention, provide justification if an innovation
P13 L2 - DMI SST / SST DMI - be consistent with the naming
P13L6 - quantitative assessment of what makes this a very good agreement would be valuable (as suggested above)
P13L24 - what exactly are ‘the ice charts’ from AARI? Are they available online?
P15L9 - can thermal fronts be seen in the daily satellite data?
P16L1 - provide uncertainty
P16L11 - how might one distinguish between these two sources of variability? Can any attempt to do so be made here? Can a comparison be made with the variability detected in the observational survey?
P16L23 - explain origin of the two separate branches
P16L29 - make it clear to the reader that these diagrams are not analogous to Fig. 7, as they are only for surface values
P16L1 - describe how water mass boundaries were determined (as suggested above)
P18L9 - worth explicitly stating that this water mass is not considered to be melt, but trapped river water, based on the geochemical analysis in 3.3.4
P18L4 - clarification required to make origin of CMS as referred to in L4 and L14 compatible. Could be simply saying that it is comprised of both transformed CF and transformed WF (if this is the case), or explicitly saying that there is no transformation route to CMS directly from WF, but it is produced only from CF.
Fig. 9 - use acronyms for the water masses as per main text
Fig. 10 - calendar time as y axis would assist linking to text. Wind speed colormap is not intuitive in my opinion (try another one?)
P23L6 - it is not surprising that there is a weak correlation between these variables; salinity changes will effectively integrate the variability in the wind (see, for instance Osadchiev et al. 2020, Fig. 4). Could the authors try correlating the time derivative of salinity and temperature with the wind speed? This might be more instructive.
P24L5 - is it that the “warm” river water signal is not observed anymore?
Fig. 13 - show dashed blue line over entire sections for those done entirely in the MIZ
P26L13 - comment on the implications of the findings regarding the B-V frequency?
P27L8 - comment on timing, which is naturally important here
P29L13 - sentence is ambiguous
P30L14 - it would be better to provide evidence that sea ice melting cannot create this freshwater horizon, than to say that there is no evidence that it can.
All figures showing maps should include the traces of the major rivers, and in my view it would be helpful to keep the names of the straits on at least one window in each figure.

Editorial
The written text needs some improvement in grammar. A few pointers: Use of ‘the’ and ‘a’ needs attention
Use of passive voice and tenses is sometimes confusing/ambiguous. I’d recommend using second person (‘we’), active voice, present tense to described things done by you, the authors, in this study.

Editor comments
Following up on Reviewer 4 “the” and “a”: “the” is the “definite article”, “a” is the “indefinite article”. That means that “the” is used when referring to something that has already been “defined”, either because already mentioned in the previous text or by an adjective, e.g. “the black cat” or “a cat” if you did not previously refer to cats.

Reviewer 1 commented on Ekman transport in shelf seas. There are two points. a. Surface Ekman transports are relative to the flow beneath the surface layer. If the wind stress implies upwelling near a coast, for example, the offshore Ekman transport implies onshore flow below and the absolute offshore transport is reduced. b. As hinted in a, the nearby coast can induce vertical velocity with uniform wind stress.

Dear Authors
Thank-you very much for your extensive revisions. I have decided that I need not send your manuscript back to referees, but there are still some matters to attend to (see below), some simply for easier reading but some also to help make the intended meaning clear, so I would like to see it again myself. [Some of these points are in your responses but not yet “reflected” in the revised manuscript. The published paper should be “self-contained”, i.e. not need reference to author responses.] Some of the figures still need attention; please try to make all the lines and labels easily visible.
Yours sincerely
John Huthnance

My editor comments.
Page 2 line 5. “ans” -> “and”
Page 2 line 5. Is the 500 km^3 "on quasi-decadal timescales" or from 1920 to 2005 or over what time period?
Page 2 lines 21-23. You should refer (here at least) to Osadchiev et al. 2020 and its relevance (c.f. Referee 1). I will not stop your publication on account of that! You may want to state the relation between Osadchiev et al. 2020 and your paper but be brief.

Page 4 line 23. “meaning the” -> “following”?
Figure 1. Stronger/darker colour for contours and ice edge positions could help.
Figure 1 caption last line. Better “. . estuary (outside the map area) is south of Yanskiy Bay.”

Figure 2 median profiles. In response to Referee 4, you might try plotting the median z(T) rather than the median T(z) etc. That would not be any actual profile either, but it would probably preserve sharper thermo-/haloclines.

Page 9 line 4. “. . measurements only for”

2.2.3/4 Your response to Ref 4 refers to satellite SSS being for the top 1 cm but I do not see this in the text.
Page 12 line 30. “carried a co-location of” -> “co-located”

Page 18 line 4. “better” -> “more extensive” – maybe say the in situ measurements miss the southern Laptev sea, close to the origin of the riverine water, as in your response.
Page 18 lines 4-6. Please be consistent: temperature rises then falls or increases then decreases.
Page 18 line 29. Not “descends”; maybe “extends”?

Page 24 bottom – page 25 lines 1-3. Did you look at wind vs. change of T, S as suggested by Ref 4?

Page 28 line 3. Sea ice melt is figure 14b?
Page 28 line 18 and Figure 15. Text and caption lettering needs to match figure, e.g. SST is 15 a, b.

Page 30 line 33. “see the position of 37-m isobath in the Laptev Sea in Fig.15”. It is very hard to see the isobaths. Please make the line and label darker / stronger colour.

Page 31 line 17. “(as a reminiscent of Kelvin wave” -> “(reminiscent of a Kelvin wave”
Page 31 line 29. “was the largest” -> “was at its largest”

Dear Authors
Thank-you for your latest revisions. I am accepting your responses on the scientific questions, particularly as I expect them to be available alongside the published paper. Here follow just a few suggested “technical corrections” for clarity and easy reading. I do not expect to act again myself, but there will be copy-editing by the publisher; please check that this keeps your intended meaning.
Thank-you for publishing in Ocean Science.
Yours sincerely
John Huthnance

Technical corrections
Page 1 line 18. “. . of global . .” (omit “a”)?
Page 2 line 34. “. . (2015)). The direction . .”
Page 3 line 7. “until” –> “down to”
Page 3 line 10. “and open water or under the ice measurements” – > “and whether measured in open water or under ice”
Page 3 line 29. Remove first “(“ and “)”.
Page 4 line 4. Delete “a”.
Page 6 lines 27-28. Threshold for conservative temperature gradient (per 1 m) is missing – or perhaps omit “conservative temperature and”.
Page 9 line 29. Delete last “a”.
Page 10 line 8. Better “. . computed for 0.5◦C temperature classes starting . .”
Page 9 line 10, page 11 line 26, page 11 line 33. Perhaps the definitions of Levels 4, 3, 2 might be footnotes referenced by a superscript. The definitions are quite long and “get in the way”.
Page 12 line 18. Remove last “)”.
Page 12 line 30. Remove first “of”.
Page 12 line 31. “a” –> “the”
Page 13 line 1. “The correlation coefficient is 0.86 with a RMS = 0.86.” Please check that you mean these two values to be the same (if RMS includes the mean difference then RMS < 2.06 is impossible, but perhaps you subtracted the mean difference – as lines 4-5 – before calculating the RMS).
Page 15 lines 2-5. You have not defined τv. In the definition of τu, usually the second factor is wind speed, not (uwind). You have defined ustar but you have not used this to define CD or the wind stress τ.
Page 16 line 33. Remove “of salinity”
Page 19 lines 1-2. “Fig. 9 with the amount of saline . . occupying” –> “Fig. 9; saline . . occupies”
Page 19 lines 6-7. Remove one “as well”.
Page 30 lines 19-20. “If we suppose that the equilibrium water depth hp, where the bottom friction becomes 0, is 25 m . .” I do not understand (i) “equilibrium . . depth” or (ii) “bottom friction becomes 0”. Bottom friction will only be small if near-bottom current is small or stratification is large. The context either side suggests that you refer to the depth of the buoyancy flow where it detaches from the bottom. However, it is not obvious that “equilibrium” and “bottom friction becomes 0” apply here. I think you could remove these expressions since lines 21-23 do not seem to depend on them.
Page 31 line 14. Better “changed its direction to more westerly (and downwelling favourable), . .” [NB westward means towards west, westerly means from west].
Page 31 line 14. Better “. . buoyant plume of river waters was displaced . .”
Page 31 line 15. “buoyancy” –> “buoyant”
Page 31 line 26. Remove “as a”.
Page 32 line 16. Define ADT here.
Figure A1. The scale for currents is very small and you should show that the colour (bar) is for ADT.
Figure A1 caption. Are you sure about the units for dynamic topography (cm) and geostrophic currents (cm/s)? The values seem very small if these units are correct.