Interactive comment on “ Seasonal variability of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation at 11 ◦ S inferred from bottom pressure measurements

While any effort to extract as much information about the AMOC variability as possible from temporally and spatially sparse existent data is appreciated, the use of a model simulation (1948-2007) that does not overlap with the observations (2013-2018) is problematic. This makes it harder to pinpoint the reasons for the differences between model and observations and thus to trust the chosen observational strategy.

As a consequence, the seasonal cycle of AMOC transport from the observations is very different from that obtained from the model. Not only the maximum and minimum values occur in different months of the year, but also their amplitudes are statistically different.
In addition, the description of the results using different periods of time is very confusing. For instance, the periodograms of Ekman transport are presented for 2013-2018 from ASCAT dataset and for [2002][2003][2004][2005][2006][2007]  Finally, the manuscript is long and most of its content is on validating the analysis rather than showing and discussing the main results about the AMOC variability. For instance, the latter is only introduced on page 11. The readability of the manuscript would also improve if information is conveyed in a more clear and straightforward way.

Specific Comments
Lines 21-22: "Here, long Rossby waves originating from equatorial forcing are known to be radiated from the Angolan continental slope and propagate westward into the basin interior." Is this shown in this study (here) or concluded from other studies? After reading the manuscript, I could not find any analysis that presents this. Lines 376-389: It seems that the observation/model comparison is inconclusive.
Lines 395-403: In Fig. 12, why is the slice from 15W to 5W not included in the calculation for the interior transport? The definition of AMOC transport encompasses the whole basin, and if one wants to discuss the contributions of the WBC, interior and EBC to the AMOC variability, the slice from 15W to 5W has to be included in the interior transport. Later in lines 418-420, the authors state that there is a minimum in the annual and semi-annual harmonics in this range. However, this is not a good reason to not include the contribution from 15W-5W in the calculations. If the related transport is also minimum there, including this won't affect the main findings, but it will make the results more consistent.
Line 401-403: This is why the use of a model output that encompass the same period of the observations is so important. And also, a comparison between using shorter versus longer time series from model outputs would permit to evaluate the impact of using observed short time series on the seasonal variability.
Lines 401-427: Fig. 13a is not mentioned in the text but shows that there is not a defined seasonal cycle of the NBUC during the period of 2013-2018.
Lines 428-531: What is the impact of using the combined annual and semi-annual cycles for the eastern boundary after 11/2015 since they explain 44-61% of the variance in the daily BP time series there and for the western boundary before 05/2014 since they explain only 18-24% of the variance in this case (Lines 229-238). This was one of the main reasons to use the model outputs. Doesn't this procedure lead inevitably to the conclusion that the geostrophic transport variations are dominated by seasonal variability (Lines 466-467).
Lines 428-531: This section is too long, and the manuscript readability would benefit if most of this discussion was made in Section 5 when the authors present the results. It