Dryad is a data archiving serviced provided by libraries in the U.S.

  We don't believe we can edit what it served there.  Therefore, we

  want to wait until the paper is finalized before archiving these data.

  In case the reviewer comments require us to make changes

Dear Dr. Uchida, 

We thank you for your feedback and suggestions! We are still in the process of making changes to our manuscript but would like to get back to you on a few of your comments.

1. Your comment for lines 46-47 has been noted. We revised the wording as suggested and added a reference to Leroux, et al., 2022, which seems to be the most appropriate.
2. Your comment for lines 285-287 has been noted. We added text to the beginning of section 4.2.2 titled “Differences”, in order to clarify. However, we defer the details on where the thresholds arise to Appendix A. 
3. Your comment for line 324 and several figures has been noted. The dT is equivalent. Thank you for pointing that out. We have updated the figures and text, which will be seen in the final manuscript version. 
4. Your comment for lines 223-224 and 375-376 has been noted. We added a short paragraph at the end of the Southern Ocean discussion in Section 4.2.2 Differences and will be shown in the final manuscript version. 

“One possible explanation for more energetic SST fields in LLC4320 relative to VIIRS is the fact that LLC4320 was inadvertently forced with tidal potential that is 10% more energetic than the real ocean (Yu et al., 2019; Arbic et al., 2022) resulting in, for example, more energetic internal tides than observed.  A second, in our opinion more likely, explanation is that the 1/48-deg horizontal grid spacing of the simulation, although it is sufficient to enable the gravest modes of mixed layer instabilities to be captured, is insufficient to fully represent the smaller-scale instabilities that would damp the magnitude of the resolved instabilities.”

        5. Your comment for lines 317-318 has been noted. We added a short paragraph at the end of the Equatorial band discussion in Section 4.2.2 Differences. 

“Another possible explanation for lack of SST structure in the equatorial region is the limited spatiotemporal resolution of the prescribed atmospheric forcing (0.14deg and six-hourly).  A recently-completed coupled ocean-atmosphere simulation (Torres et al., 2022; Light et al., 2022; Dushaw and Menemenlis, 2023) provides high-frequency/wavenumber interactive forcing (0.0625deg and 45 seconds) to the ocean. It would be interesting to repeat the present analysis on this simulation to determine whether the equatorial SST structures of this coupled simulation are more similar to VIIRS.”

To add on, we would like to get back to you on your question for lines 265-272. 

In Section 4.2.1 titled “Similarities”, we do not think there is a reason for concern that correcting the LL_LLC will lead to an unfair analysis. The term “correcting” gives off the wrong impression. We hope to emphasize that correcting the LL_LLC values means we are just subtracting the spatial average of LL_LLC values and adding to it the spatial average of LL_VIIRS values. In other words, we're trying to remove these "large-scale" differences to see how similar the submesoscale structure is in between the datasets. This altered view of LL_LLC values is only used in the analysis for that section. The rest of the discussion (aka. Section 4.2.2) is not using the corrected LL_LLC. We also include a link here to the HEALPix software: https://healpix.sourceforge.io/index.php. 

Dear Anonymous Referee,

We thank you for your feedback and suggestions as well. We again are in the process of making changes to the manuscript. For now, we would like to inform you of our current status for resolving your comments. 

1. Your comment on the title has been noted. We are of the belief we sufficiently addressed the role of submesoscale structure in our manuscript. Ulmo –our machine learning algorithm– was trained to identify submesocale SSTa patterns in cutouts. This was achieved by restricting the cutout size to  ~100-100 km^2, thus forcing Ulmo to detect structure on the order of 10-80 km scales. We state this in Section 3.1 Creation of Comparable SSTa cutouts: “The size of these samples was chosen in part to focus on features at scales of ~30 km or smaller.” Line {108-109}. We also include in the introduction a reason for motivation to evaluate based on submesoscale structure, since it has not to our knowledge been done before for global, free-running OGCMs. Lines {52-53}
2. Your comments for lines 10-20 have been noted. Changes have been made to the regional difference ordering in the introduction to match the manuscript's content. We thank you for your attention to detail.
3. Your comment for line 260 has been noted. We numbered the equations, which will be seen in the final version of the manuscript. Thank you for calling us out on that.
4. Your comment for Figure 10 has been noted. We added text to the introduction to clarify that this manuscript’s primary purpose is to present a relatively new statistical method in evaluating OGCMs. Thus, we do not provide an exhaustive evaluation of the LLC4320 SST outputs. In the case you mentioned, we investigated each of the groupings we mentioned for Figure 10, instead of investigating the largest differences. These largest LL differences were found to be around boundary currents. These boundary currents are of a dynamic nature that leads to lower LL values. Thus, slight differences in the current’s position or deviation from its dynamic nature makes those regions, in terms of LL differences, appear more drastic. We wanted to also investigate, in your language, the smaller LL differences (though still greater than -197/197) to showcase that it also picks up different SSTa patterns between LLC and VIIRS. We thank you for your observation and for the opportunity to clarify.