In general, I did not find your responses sufficiently convincing. In places your responses to the reviewers were detailed but the text added to the paper was minimal. Please ensure that information that the reviewers asked for is added to the paper.

Please could you revise Figures 3, 4, 7, and 10 to use a colour-blind-friendly colormap, i.e. not colormap jet in Matlab. There are plenty of colormaps available now that are more accessible to all. See for example this article from 2014 https://www.climate-lab-book.ac.uk/2014/end-of-the-rainbow/

Reviewer 1 asks for more information on the boundary layer (mixed layer) formulation that you use in ROMS. I do not think you have really answered this with the information provided in the paper. Your response is to repeat more detail of ROMS. What the reviewer is asking for is not to put information in the response, but to put information into the paper, exactly how the upper ocean boundary layer is treated in the model?

Reviewer 1 commented that Figure 5 (now Figure 6) was “rather poor” and asked you to “please highlight and enlarge important panels of Fig 5”. This figure looks the same to me. It needs improvement. Please highlight and enlarge important panels, and consider also plotting the differences between the lines.

Reviewer 1 also comments that you need a metric to determine how good the model is. You choose to use correlation. However two things could be perfectly correlated but orders of magnitude different. Therefore you need to come up with a different metric. I suggest you use the metric suggested by the reviewer – the difference in near-inertial EKE. You will need to add discussion of the differences in the paper.

Reviewer 2 asked that “While the data was generally publicly available, more details on how the authors treated the data for QAQC, or what default QAQC if any they used from the downloaded data is required.” While you have added a section describing the data, thank you, you did not mention any quality control. Did you simply download other people’s publicly available data and use them as they are? If so, you should say so clearly. Did you pay attention to any flags? Did you check the data for outliers etc? It is important to know exactly what *you* did. For example did you grid the data? Smooth or average them, in time and/or in space? You were not involved in the glider data acquisition or the HF radar acquisition I think, so you should make sure that those who did are clearly acknowledged and that you state in the text where and when you downloaded the data, what resolution or version you used, and what you did with the data.

Thank you for clarifying that you detided the model currents and the HF radar currents. Please can you state how you did this, with a reference if appropriate.
You added a mention of there being little Cold Pool water present, as the reviewer suggested. Could you expand on your text here please, to explain why little cold pool water leads to insignificant cooling and fast recovery?

Reviewer 2 says that “the strength of stratification is likely the most important model feature to validate”, but you have not validated this? Please could you quantify how well the model reproduces the observed strength of stratification, and add a discussion of this.

You have not really responded sufficiently to “Were data dropouts documented, or could there be dynamical reason that the NIC are in poorer agreement offshore? The HF Radar data should include quality flags to identify missing or low quality data.”. The question needs to be addressed – did you use the quality flags? You have responded with information about coverage, but what does this mean? Why was there low coverage? Or if you are simply downloading someone else’s data, what do the quality flags mean and how did you use them? Are there data dropouts? Are there dynamical reasons for poor agreement? This needs discussion in the paper, beyond the sentence you added.

Thank you for adding the extra figure showing the lines. However you have not added anything to the paper in response to “Is the 75m D3 location the beginning of the shelf-break front, a mesoscale feature impinging on the shelf, or simply too far from the main track?”. Please add some sentences to address this.

Thank you for your responses and revisions.