Dear Johannes & co-authors,

I am satisfied with the very substantial improvements that you have made to the paper.
Writing a paper that puts equal emphasis on biochemistry and physical oceanography is a challenging task. I find that this revised version actually meets this challenge successfully.

On the physics side, your new Figure 4 displays sharp contrasts in Richardson number (N^2/S^2) between the more “quiescent” core and the edge of the eddy where conditions prone to Kelvin-Helmholtz instability (Ri < ¼) and vertical mixing are much more frequent.

On the biogeochemistry side, the new figure 6 presenting turbidity data is very useful in showing the POM flux that you later depict schematically in Figure 8. In my opinion, the complementary figure presenting uncalibrated Chlorophyl-a data, included in your response to reviewer # 2, would be a valuable companion to your Turbidity figure that should be included in the final paper. I found it interesting to see the very different vertical distributions of chloroplyll between the IFM12 and IFM 13 surveys; this provides context for interpretation of the turbidity figure.

Other minor corrections

P5, line 19; should contour be plural (contours)?

Panel b) on Figure 2 has a green line that is extremely hard for the eye to detect. Could you explore using a different colour to indicate the mixed layer base?

Panel a) of Figure 3 has units of gr/kg; you should drop the “r” and replace with g/kg.

In panel e) of Figure 5, spell out Region in full rather than Reg.

Best regards,

Denis Gilbert, guest editor

Dear Johannes, I am attaching a markup up pdf file with many small typos or grammar errors that need to be corrected. Please work closely with the copy-editor to make sure you correct all of those errors for the BG version of the paper.

Best regards, Denis