Dear Dr. Sasaki,

Thank you very much for your point-by-point responses to the comments from the two referees. It seems that these replies are basically reasonable. So we would appreciate it very much if you could submit the latest version of your manuscript to BG. Once we get your revised manuscript, it will be sent for further review.

Thank you again for your nice effort to improve the paper.

Kind regards,

Koji Suzuki
Editor

Dear Authors,

Thank you very much for revising your manuscript. We have just received two reviews of the revised manuscript. The reviewer #1 was pleased to find significant improvement of your paper as compared with the first edition, but there still have some minor issues (see the file attached). Also another comments were derived from a new reviewer. The major concern of the reviewer is the weakness of motivations (questions and/or hypotheses) described in the introduction of this manuscript (see the details below).

So we would appreciate it very much if you could make a further revised manuscript following their comments.

Thank you again for your nice effort to improve the manuscript.

Kind regards,

Koji Suzuki
Editor


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Reviewer #2

This paper deals with the distribution of copepods in the Arctic Ocean in relation to the environmental variables. The analysis was based in an intensive sampling for 3 summers and the phenomenon seemed to be well reproduced with the model.
What I feel discontent in this paper is found in the introduction, lacking the question or clear hypothesis which should be revealed in the paper. Because of this defect, it is unclear to locate the new scientific findings in this paper, which should be added our previous understanding in terms of Arctic copepod ecology. As authors already mentioned in the introduction, it has been well known that the distribution of copepods in this region is well corresponds to properties of water masses. Therefore I require the authors to rewrite the introduction to emphasize the importance to construct the adequate model to predict the copepod community structure in relation to the climate change so that the significance of the paper will be highlighted.
Another minor comment is about the grouping of ‘cyclopoid copepods’. Although the authors did not mentioned anything about the ‘cyclopoid copepods’ in the text, some species such as Oithona similes or Triconia are known to be abundant and could be ubiquitous in any water mass even if they use the large mesh size. In this light, the authors need to describe the genus of ‘cyclopoid copepod’ clearly (it should not be so difficult) as well as the reason why they designated the ‘cyclopoid copepod’ as the ‘small Arctic copepods’

Dear Dr. Sasaki,

It is a great pleasure now to accept your manuscript for publication in Biogeosciences. Thank you for responding to the reviewers' comments carefully. Before it is published from the journal, please consider my minor editorial comments below:

P3, L31 and P4, L24: life cycles
P4, L4: the data collected by...
P4, L19: perform their identifications
P4, L23: listed
P12, L14: by origin
Figure A4: Indicate the number for base of the logarithm (i.e., 10).
Fig. B1: Julian day – Use capital J.

Thank you again for your nice effort to improve this manuscript.

Kind regards,

Koji Suzuki
Editor