We would like to thank the reviewer for his careful review.

1. Biogeochemistry:

Thanks for bringing more issues to our attention. The following points will be added:

• Sea ice holds nutrients, some airborne, others having ocean cycles only (silicates). Nutrients are flushed to the surface ocean through brine channels, like salt. A very recent reference to Lund-Hansen et al. (2024) has been added. 
• Sea ice carries sediments, nutrients, various biological material and pollutants from the shallow shelf seas to the central Arctic (Krumpen et al. 2019).  
• Sea ice acts as a lid preventing exchange of greenhouse gases fluxes between ocean and atmosphere, but the sea ice also holds its own carbon pump accounting for 30% of the Carbon uptake in the Arctic (Richaud et al. 2023).  

2. Model bias and further improvement 

Thanks for keeping our feet on the ground, we have tried to improve the logic and make this section more conclusive by introducing this text:

"Biases in sea ice area coverage arise from multiple sources, primarily from biased ocean and atmospheric boundary conditions, but also intrinsic biases of the sea ice model itself. These biases interact with each other in complex ways (feedback loops or cancellation of errors). 

The main avenues towards reducing these biases are the following:

• Advocating for optimal observing networks, using data assimilation techniques. 
• Improving atmospheric and ocean models, in particular the representation of their boundary layers. 
• Improving sea ice models. 
• In the meantime, post-processing techniques, now aided by machine learning, are a novelty in sea ice forecasting (Parleme et al. 2021, 2023). "

Specific comments:

L20: To meet this goal,

OK. 

L39, 41: “birthday party” is a bit narrative. Is it a well-accepted expression in the scientific community?

It is not, this is an original attempt to catch the readers’ attention. We aim at readers outside of the sea ice community and hope that some light humour will stimulate their long-term memory. There are other basic emotions such as sadness, fear or anger that can help forming long-term memories, but we will rather choose joy. 

L40: This process is called “brine rejection”, so you may add this word in the sentence.

 Thanks, added. 

L60: I am a bit confused. Does it mean a positive feedback, because the waves get amplified with smaller ice floes and generate more ice floes with smaller scales.

 No, it is a negative feedback: the waves are scattered by more numerous ice-ocean edges of smaller floes and are attenuated. Clarified in the text. 

Figure 1: Do you have any satellite observation map to validate the model simulation? This would help readers to understand how reasonably the model reproduces the sea ice thickness.

 OK, adding CS2SMOS for the same date. 

Table 1: “SIUV motions” should be “SIUV velocities”. What is “SID”? Also, remove “**” in the area of the IcePOM in the table.

Thanks for the corrections. SID is Sea ice Drift, replaced by SIUV in the new text. 

Stars are footnotes to the captions. 

We would like to thank the reviewer for the constructive remarks.

Specific comments:

Line 60: "Smaller ice floes offer more reflecting edges and are more efficient at attenuating waves." This statement is incomprehensive as it only mentions reflection or scattering, but not dissipation through multiple energy non-conservative processes in the ice effects on waves, which is also mentioned in Squire (2020).

Thanks for the insightful remark, dissipation has been added. 

Technical corrections:

Regarding Chapter 2's organization: The "Overview of processes in sea ice" currently includes sections that aren't strictly processes (numerical models and data assimilation). I would recommend that the author consider restructuring the technical sections into a new chapter regarding the current modeling approaches.

Correct, all these subsections have been turned into sections. 

In Table 1, it mentions "*Output interpolated to 9 km" in the caption, but the corresponding entry isn't shown in the table. Moreover, the links for GIOPS and RIOPS are not precise, and Met Office FOAM may also need a relevant link.

Thanks, the missing asterisk has been added to the ECMWF line in the table. 

The links for GIOPS and RIOPS were provided by ECCC. 

The FOAM high-resolution forecast system is distributed to selected users and has been removed from the table.