Dear Mr. Hutter and Dr. Losch,

Thank you for your details response to the reviewers. I have some additional comments to add after consideration of the reviews and your response. Thank you to the reviewers for identifying points that were not clear in the paper.

I trust you will ensure that the paper is clear especially in regard to it goals and your contribution towards improving assessment of sea ice deformation in models. I am in agreement with you that more metrics, other than spatial and temporal scaling, are needed. It is an important point that scaling relationships are a not unique indicator that a simulated deformation field is physically realistic.

I believe it is important to keep in mind the limitations of the viscous-plastic model. I found that instabilities in the stress-velocity field can follow model grid lines. This might be one reason you find modeled LKF intersection angles cluster around 90 degrees. While I agree that a full sensitivity study is beyond the scope of this paper, such studies have been performed with more idealised models and could help in understanding the persistence and density behaviour of the viscous-plastic model. The fact that there is an increase in instability density with the ITD is not surprising, but does need to be pointed out to people who use these models. As you point out the ITD allows steep gradients in the stress field (ice strength being a function of ice thickness), that may not present with a smoother thickness field. It is very important, from my experience, in idealised sensitivity studies to control for various sources of stress discontinuities: from poorly filtered wind fields due to interpolation proceedure, to poorly converging viscous-plastic solution, to the parameterisation of the strength.

I would like to point out an incorrect definition that is in the title of your paper. Two kilometers is not lead resolving. True, some leads may be two kilometers or more in width, but there is a distribution of lead and crack widths from sub-meter to many kilometers. You need to be careful about this, in the title to your paper and elsewhere where you state the models are lead resolving.

While I agree with much of your response to the reviewers there are some points I feel you should address.

I also on my first read of the paper questions if the two simulations had been cherry picked. Your description of how the runs were set up was very helpful and should be included in the paper.

Regarding your upper limit in angle between sections that are pieced together into LKFs, have you considered the high curvature tidal cracking can form? I realise this is outside of the scope of your paper, but I do caution you to consider that this impact of the cut off will change with model resolution and also the kinematics a model can resolve. Does your cut off length of 125km preclude inclusion of features with high curvature?

Some specific comments:

page 16, line 27: constraining your analysis to LKFs that form in the same time record may not be a strict enough constraint to ensure LKFs formed at the same time. RGPS images can be days apart. While this is the best you can do, I feel you need to acknowledge the limitation.

If the mechanism creating LKFs in the viscous-plastic model is an instability in the model itself, how does this compare to actual quasi-brittle or granular failure? I ask this question because I feel it is important that we understand how this instability is controlled by noise in the ice strength (or stress) field and I wonder if we can parameterise this to produce realistics LKF densities. The use of a damage parameter and brittle failure is perhaps shifting this to a more physically tractable representation, yet you may still need to control for ice age in some way in what ever parameterisation you use.

Finally, density and number is an interesting parameter to compare between LKFs extracted from 10km (roughly) resolution RGPS and 2km resolution model. Perhaps I missed this, but how did you control for this?

Best regards,
Jenny

Thank you for your consideration of my comments and your improvements to the manuscript based on reviewers comments. I feel this paper is ready for publications now.
Jenny