Dear authors,
Both reviewers are happy with your revision and suggested only a few technical corrections, which are enclosed below:

#1
The revised article has clear logic and more clarified illustrations for the worried elements previously. The finding in this study will be very helpful how to improve the sea ice prediction in an Arctic model forecast system. Consequently, I think it is appropriate to be published, and only have some minor comments as follows.

Line 24 at P2, “weakens” should be replaced by “weaken”.

Page 4 in the caption of Table 1, what does the meaning of “a MIP variable”?

Line 124 at P5, it should be “PIOMAS” not “PIOMASS”.

Eq. 2 should be corrected by using the expectation by meaning of averaged on the time?

Line 171 at P7: missing the clarification for Hice in the brackets, using “… and mean ice thickness, …” to replace “… and m, …”?

Line 467 at P21: using “improvements” to replace the “improvement”.

Line 546 at P25: replaced by “arises”.

Line 557 at P25: replaced by “does”.

Line 566 at P26: “the Siberian High in the ice-growth months are more important than …” Add a reference for this point if possible.

Line 575 at P27: redundant “of”.

#2
Please, make a spell and grammar check (e.g. l.114 exercies, l.122 a...states).
Further, Point 3: (Line 207-2108): I would skip this first part :
"Because initial atmospheric conditions do not play an important role for interannual to decadal predictions, for convenience," - as it is not clear, which role slow modes of the atmosphere play for the ocean and sea ice state. A discussion on initialization of the atmosphere goes beyond the scope of the manuscript.

Best regards
Qiang Wang