Dear Luciano and co-authors,
Thank you for this revised version of your manuscript and the detailed response that you provided to both referees. I think the paper is in a very good shape, and almost ready. However, my advice is that the paper needs some additional minor changes before publication.
My main concern is that several of the points raised by the reviewers (and perfectly addressed by your comments) are very appropriate and raise some additional discussion points (mostly concerning the methods and validation) that should be incorporated into final manuscript. For instance:
- Provide additional discussion in the MS on the methodological choices made for EOF computation (the previous filtering / interpolation) and the potential consequences in the results, in agreement to the comments of the reviewers and your answers.
- Provide additional discussion in the MS on the possible impact of the depth of the first ADCP cells on the observed differences (at 13.5 MHz your radar measurements are very shallow (<0.5m), so differences can be expected when comparing with pointwise measurements at 2-4 m depth)
- Even if not clear explanation can be given, additional discussion should be provided for the mismatch observed in January 2017 between HFR and ADCP
- Both reviewers agree (and I do too) that the comparison with un-drogued drifters is not meaningful for validation purposes. I see you want to keep this comparison in the MS because is the only data offshore, I think you an keep it but please provide a good rationale for it – i.e. explaining this is a comparison showing a qualitative agreement between surface currents provided by the radar (surface current) and the surface drifters (surface current+wind) and consider avoiding the use of validation statistics (table 1). Did you consider performing Lagrangian comparisons? Another possibility is to check the wind in the period of comparisons (you could indeed perform quantitative comparisons with data only for periods of very low winds).
- a typo in Line 232 “lagrangean” --> “Larangian”

Best regards,
Anna Rubio

Dear Dr de Oliveira and co-authors,

Thank you for this last version of the manuscript and for having appropriately addressed all the reviewers’ and editor’s comments.

I am pleased to announce that I consider the paper to be now ready for publication. Congratulations and thanks for submitting your work to Ocean Science.

Yours sincerely
Anna Rubio
(Topic editor)