Dear authors,

many thanks for your thorough and timely resubmission.

You have very completely answered both reviewers criticisms and the paper has substatially improved in my view. The paper has however also changed substantially and I have therefore decided to accept subject to revisions and rereview by one of the original referees.

Please upload your manuscript with the changes implemented as listed as soon as possible so that I can arrange this.

many thanks and best wishes

Ruth Mottram

Dear authors,
I am happy to tell you that your manuscript has been accepted for publication subject to a few technical corrections as identified by the 2nd reviewer and listed below. Please consider revising these points before uploading your final manuscript.

Best wishes

Ruth Mottram

Line 39: I read the line starting wih “The seasonal Arctic...” as the is mainly correlated with ice
concentration, thickness and form drag. These are of course important but the wind speed should
also play a role unless the variation is canceled out on longer time period. The statement could be a
bit more clear or a reference could be added.

Line 190 The mean horizontal resolution in the Arctic is .... (docquier et al 2017). The refeernce
points to a nemo-lim article. Does this include references to Piomas as well? Otherwize why
reference this?

Line 197: Providing an uncertainty for the passive microwave product is a bit simplified. The
uncertainty/bias depends on proximity to land(not for the evaluation of this model), meltponds and
regridding from satellite swats to daily gridded products. In general larger uncertainty near the ice
edge and in summer. I would just mention that there are uncertainties due to these factors.

Line 200 as Line 190

Line 203. Even if PIOMAS was not assimilated I would not call the difference a bias of NAOSIM.
It is just another model.

Line 282. I assume that this is pstar (30.000 Nm^-2). Some sort of reference or description of the
valued

Line 327 ca. I think that it is more correct to use approximately

Lin3 347 Figure 5. Is this figure 5c and 5f?

Lin3 357 and figure 6: Does it make sense to make a fit of all months when the concentration is the
same in group 2.. Instead could group 2 have a different colorcoding/symbolsof the dots?

Line 411. See line 327

Line 434 A bit unclear what normalized (none normalized). What are they normalized with?

Section 4.3 I would probably move 4.3 to the end of the summary/conclusion section

Figure 5. I thnk that the y-axis to the left can be removed )model, KIMURA/ERA-
Interim,PIOMAS)

Figure 7: References to sub-figure d needs to be c in the first and last occurance on line 731