There have been various recent papers linking internal waves/tides with cold water coral distribution and abundance. This is the first one, to the best of our knowledge, that approaches the question from a global context. The focus on biophysical interaction means that it may be of particular interest to the broad geoscience community.

This paper, using pre-storm, immediate post-storm and recovery data, quantifies seafloor elevation and volume change within the Looe Key Reef system of the Florida Keys Reef Tract over a 2.5-year period from 2016–2019 and to examine impacts from category-4 Hurricane Irma and post-storm re-equilibration of seafloor sediments. The study highlights the need to data collected over seasonal and annual time periods to improve characterization and understanding of short-term (event-driven, seasonal, interannual) and long-term (decadal to multi-decadal) rates and processes of seafloor change and help guide benthic habitat post-storm recovery and restoration efforts in topographically complex coral reef systems.

This paper thoroughly describes the data processing steps and assessment of the usefulness of the new SWOT mission for advancing ocean science. The paper will be of great interest the ocean and sea ice communities and others. The discussion of the benefits, relevance, and limitations of Level-3 swath-altimeter products for various research domains is particularly important.

This is an original study on a on a coastal ecosystem, combining environmental data with data on phytoplankton functional groups. Such a time series on flow cytometry in combination with environmental data at high temporal resolution over multiple years is relatively rare and can give a detailed view into the variability of the phytoplankton community over the last decade. This is the first pluri-annual study of the whole size-range of the phytoplankton community characterized by one unique method.

This study is based on observations from the new swath altimetry satellite SWOT. It is the first to describe and characterise internal tides using this new altimetry mission. It therefore highlights the 2D potential of SWOT and opens up new prospects for studying the variability of the internal tide.

The paper demonstrates how oceanographic parameters, like Sea Level Anomaly, surface currents and vorticity, from remote sensing are improved when SWOT (Surface Water Ocean Topography) data are included.