Dear Mr. Bateson and coauthors,

Thank you for your detailed response to the two reviews. I have considered these and believe your paper may be acceptable for publication after major revisions, however will need to clarify some points were adequately addressed with the reviewers. I invite you to provide a revised manuscript.

There are some points I would like to clarify in your response.


You reference Stern et al 2013a. I can not find this paper in your citations. I think you mean 2018a. Incidentally, my read of this paper was that the exponent in the power law for flow size distribution was not exactly consistent, and they had difficulties understanding why. They do argue that a single power law can fit across a wide range of floe sizes (and point out a potential issue with data showing regime shifts as a truncation error), but they do not find a consistent value for the exponent. I see that you comment on a potential seasonality of the exponent in your introduction, and you discuss the possible range of the exponent in your model design, so you might want to check page 5 of your response to reviewer 2.

You asked my editorial opinion on the figures. Regarding how you present the units, I prefer not to use a slash. Some people might interpret this as the unit being raised to the power -1. Regarding the captions, I will leave this up to you. The caption should include information needed to interpret the figure and not information that one would expect to find in the manuscript text. Though sometimes it is handy to describe the data in the figure more fully.

Please include the data availability section.

Finally, if you can make a version of the manuscript with track changes this will greatly help review. You are recommended to use latexdiff, if you are writing in latex:
https://www.the-cryosphere.net/for_authors/submit_your_manuscript.html


Looking forward to your revision,
Jenny

Dear Adam and co-authors

Thank you for your detailed response to the reviewers. Particularily I am glad to see you have corrected the many errors in the maths, model and methodology description. This paper will need to be reviewed again as there are some points I want to check with an expert. In the mean time I do have a couple of small points I hope you can address in a future revision.

You state:
"This is the largest range of floe sizes that a truncated power law has produced a good fit to, hence
these are set as the standard values for the floe size limits𝑑𝑚𝑖𝑛 and 𝑑𝑚𝑎𝑥 in this study. " Line 11-12 section 4.1

Observational limits are likely to define dmin and dmax taking this definition. Would it not be better to allow dmin and dmax to be physically defined. I believe this is what you are doing when you vary them.

Please check that you are consistent in your signs for alpha. I see that you have positive alpha on lines 31/32 section 4.2, whereas negative earlier in the paragraph.

Please acknowledge the reviewers whose comments substantially improved the manuscript. The errors and confusing text in the original manuscript might have stayed if they had not been diligent in checking your methodology, which would have reflected badly on you.

Thank you for your care, and I am hoping to see this paper progress after I obtain a second opinion.
Jenny

Dear Adam and co-authors,

Please see the review of your paper. This reviewer, while pleased that you addressed many of their concerns, has some major concerns about the model that must be addressed before publication is possible.

There was one reviewer who wished to write a short comment rather than a full review. The points that they would like you to address are:

1. The advection scheme used in the model is not suitable, as maximum floe size is not an area-conserved quantity.
2. I wanted to ask for clarification on how they compute the change in basal melt as a result of change in sea ice area. It was not clear to me from the manuscript how they computed this when I tried to reproduce the calculation with my own model results. I think it would also be important to look at spatial maps here, rather than simply the area-integrated quantities.

I echo the concern regarding the advection scheme, and had flagged your response to this as inadequate even before receiving the short comment above. Regarding the reviewer's comments on lmax, this reviewer has considerable insight into the literature and has pointed out a design flaw in your model that either must be corrected or acknowledged and the implications of imposing the upper limit on floe size to the model solution fully documented.

Given the serious nature of the comments I am turning the paper back to you for major revisions. I hope this will give you enough time to address the concerns in the best way possible.

Best regards,
Jenny

Dear Adam and Co-authors,

Thank you for your detailed response to the reviewers. I feel the work is sufficient for publication, however I would like to echo the reviewers in that there are areas in the model that could be improved upon in future. I am glad that you are considering the suggested changes to thresholding in your future work and perhaps this should be mentioned in the paper so future readers might be alerted to this.

I do feel that you should be more transparent as to how your model could potentially misrepresent physics. I agree that an empirical model is useful for assessing feedbacks, but there are some obvious limitations in the model. In particular I feel you need to be more explicit in how the variable l_{var} controls the floe size distribution and that this is perhaps not following known physical processes, as pointed out by reviewer 2.

I am okay with not including figure 1 from your response letter in the manuscript. It is sufficient for this to be in the response to the reviewers, which I believe is archived. I would say however, that you are welcome to include it if you wish. It does help the reader to see where the differences lie and it would be instructive for the reader to see where this alligns to changes in ice concentration. Your text sums this up qualitatively.

Some technical corrections you could consider

The MIZ is actually defined as the regions of ice under the influence of waves. Hence lines 10-12 on page 2 are a little awkward to read.

line 30 page 4: "was used" not will be. You are reporting on work performed in the past.

line 26, page 8: A '+' symbol has been accidentally placed in 'produc+es'.

Best regards,
Jenny