Dear authors,

Thank you for uploading a revised version of your manuscript. I am now happy to accept it for publication, subject to a few final technical corrections.

In regard to code and data availability, I remind you that manuscripts published in Geoscientific Model Development must ensure that the reader has access to sufficient code and data to be able to reproduce the results. Indeed, it is a mandatory requirement for publication in the journal that the reader must be able to access the EXACT source code that you used.

From our previous discussion of this subject, I was left with the understanding that you used a pure version of ROMS 3.6 in the current study. However, in your response to Referee #1, you state that:

“Co-Author Powell is a ROMS code contributor, and the ROMS 3.6 codebase was used with modifications for the HF radar assimilation and others mentioned in Souza et al. (2015).”

Can you please clarify whether or not these modifications are distributed as part of the ROMS codebase. If yes, then please expand the “Code and data availability” section to provide sufficient information that would allow the reader to locate the specific version (or sub-version etc.) of the model within the ROMS source code repository. If no, then you must make your implementation of the ROMS codebase available (either a full model distribution or, at a bare minimum, any routines that you modified or added).

Otherwise, please consider the following technical corrections:

* Page 5, lines 133-135 and Page 6, line 138: Please correct the formatting of these references.

* Page 6, line 137: Insert “the” before “observation”?

* Page 7, line 178: Remove “is” before “referred”?

* Page 8, line 219: mix → mixed.

* Page 10, line 271: Aguarius → Aquarius.

* Page 19, line 527: island → islands.

Steven Phipps
Handling Topical Editor