Dear Katy,

Thank you for carefully addressing the two reviewers’ comments provided for your original manuscript submission.

In addition to the comments made by Reviewer #1 (D. Forbes), there are just a few minor points that need to be addressed in the final manuscript submission.

I concur with your argument that presenting the entire set of equations is too much and citing the other publications is fine. Nevertheless, ultimately it is only equation that determines set-up that is relevant here and including that with a brief explanation of terms may add clarity. I leave it up to you to decide that.

- fetch: off-ice winds, drawn out ice edge, errors in positioning – effective location of ice edge

p. 2, l. 4: Strictly speaking, sea ice does not prevent the interaction between land and ocean as there are a number of processes ranging from direct interaction (under-ice surges, overflow, ice push events, shorefast ice breakout) to indirect interaction (heat transfer from coastal leads and polynyas). Maybe it’s because I study sea ice, but I would recommend to change to “sea ice limits the interaction” or something along those lines. This also holds true to some degree in the following sentence, which is written from the perspective of the liquid ocean interacting with the shore. In line 21ff. this is written up very nicely and to the point.

p. 6, l. 11: Prudhoe Bay is 240 km ESE of Drew Point.

p. 7, l. 27: “a second”

p. 9, l. 6ff.: “We examine a three pixel (∼ 75 km) buffer into the ocean adjacent to the cells classified as “land” in the NSIDC landmask.” What does this mean? Prior you refer to “each nearshore cell”, so it’s not clear whether you are determining the mean ice concentration for this three pixel segment or considering each cell individually. Further down you provide more detail (l. 23/24) but that sentence does not resolve this issue either. Please clarify and consider describing the process in a single location rather than dispersed across different paragraphs.

p. 10, l. 1ff: Please include all the geographic locations that you reference here in Figure 1.

Fig. 4, please add the unit degrees to Wind direction in the axis label. Also, consider cutting off the axis at 360 degrees.

Best regards,

Hajo.