Dear Dr Tandeep,

Apologies for the delay in dealing with this paper. The situation in the past few months has made keeping on top of the work stack very difficult.

I agree with Dr Hill that this manuscript is now nearly ready for acceptance. Please tend to his comments below. In particular, I agree with him on the use of multi-letter variable names in maths equations. This is confusing and non-standard. I am not persuaded either by the argument that it is necessary to match the variable names in the code. First, the conventions for code and maths are not the same. Second, most readers will not read the code, so it's more important that the maths is clear than that it matches the code. You are, of course, welcome to include a table mapping maths symbols to variable names in the code if you wish.

The data availability section is now excellent. There are citations to DOIs which in turn point to public, persistent archives. This is exactly what GMD policy requires. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the code availability. Code is data too and the same standards apply to code as to data. Specifically, the GMD code and data policy is explicit that GitLab is not a suitable archive location. It lacks the persistence and non-revocability required of an archive, and the links provided do not identify the exact version of the code used in the paper. It's absolutely fine to point to the USGS GitLab server as the preferred download location for COAWST, however this needs to be in addition to and not instead of a persistent archive with a persistent identifier. It would, for example, be completely acceptable to archive a tarball of the exact source code used on ScienceBase.

Regards,

David Ham

Dear Tarandeep,

Thank you for your revisions, I agree that this is substantially there now. There is just one technical issue, which is that your data citations are in the form of URLs, which is not correct. Sciencebase entries themselves contain the correct citations, which should go in the bibliography and be cited from the code and data section. E.g. instead of https://www.sciencebase.gov/catalog/item/5d3b4c62e4b01d82ce8d77dd, the text should contain something like Ganju and Talra (2019), and the bibliography should contain something like:

Ganju, N.K., and Kalra, T.S., 2019, Numerical model of Submerged Aquatic Vegetation (SAV) growth dynamics in West Falmouth Harbor: U.S. Geological Survey data release, https://doi.org/10.5066/P998IJGG.

Ironically, one of the better guides for good practice in data citation is from USGS itself: https://www.usgs.gov/products/data-and-tools/data-management/data-citation

Fix these up and we're good to go.

Regards,

David