Downscaling Satellite-Based Estimates of Ocean Bottom Pressure for Tracking Deep Ocean Mass Transport

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This study wants to improvement the limiting of GRACE data products in spatial resolution with the objective analysis downscaled procedure, which would improve estimates of OBP variability near steep bathymetry. Finally, the authors suggested two possible avenues to improve the accuracy of downscaled GRACE products in discussion section.

Overall, this is very good manuscript. The authors were done a lot of works to show the results, especially the Taylor diagram in Figure 7. The manuscript also clearly writing and logical discussion. So, I recommend directly acceptance this manuscript and don’t need any improvement of the manuscript.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Dear authors,

thank you very much for this very well written study. I only have the following few minor points, which should be addressed in a revised version.

Kind regards

reviewer

line 37 + 56. Why did you mention some references with author's names, e.g. Frajka-Williams et al. [5] and Landerer et al. [9]? Please use the references consistently.

Figure 2: Impressive figure! How would the areas without shading look like, if you would define your thresholds/conditions less tight? I'm not sure, if I understand this approach with the 3 conditions entirely. Would you loose spatial resolution or correlation in your final results when you would try to fill all the NaN areas?

Figure 5: this is hard to read, especially the thicker/thinner lines for indicating smaller residuals. What does this even mean "is closer to the in-situ values", is the absolute difference below a certain threshold, is the trend similar etc.? I would propose not to use different linewidths here.

Figure 6: Does this mean, you want to see increased the std? Why?

Figure 7.(c): I only see arrows in different directions and with different size. It is very hard to extract information out of this plot.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf