Dear Mr Wiskandt and co-authors,

Thank you for submitting your point-by-point replies to the reviewer comments. I believe they are thorough and comprehensive, and they contain several interesting additional insights that will improve the readability and strengthen the discussions in the paper. I would therefore like to invite you to upload a revised version of the manuscript at your earliest convenience, taking into account all the comments raised by both reviewers, preferably implemented as tracked changes. Please also consider some additional points, listed below, which came to mind when reading your replies.

All the best,
Jan De Rydt – editor

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Additional Comments:

In your response to reviewer 2, I agree with your assessment that a more in-depth study of the model sensitivity to numerical choices such as the grid resolution warrants further work that is beyond the scope of the current study. However, I do think that the work of Gwyther et al 2020, despite their focus on different numerical designs, shows the importance of carrying out such studies, and I would consider including the reference in your discussions of future work.

Regarding your reply to reviewer 1 and Fig1 (showing the differences between your MITgcm results and the plume model) it is unclear to me if you are planning to include this figure and accompanying discussion as part of the manuscript. I would encourage you to do so, because I suspect many readers will wonder about the similarities and pitfalls when comparing (essentially 1D) MITgcm output to 1D plume theory. Please do consider adjusting the caption and legend of the figure to explain more clearly what is meant by “AW”, “Final” and “MITgcm”. For example, it was not entirely clear to me what you mean by the “profile at x=21km from MITgcm”, and I believe the units on the X axis should be in kms rather than meters.

One final comment is about the boundary conditions for the ocean thermal forcing experiments (described in section 2.2). Unless I missed this, I could not find a description of how exactly T_AW was varied. Can you show vertical sections of T and S, similar to Fig 1d?

Dear Jonathan and co-authors,

Thank you for taking the time to reply to my comments, and for implementing the changes in the manuscript. I think the text is now ready for publication. I would like to thank you for choosing The Cryosphere for publishing your work, and would like to extend a sincere thanks to both reviewers for their support.

All the best,
Jan De Rydt - editor