General and Local Characteristics of Current Marine Heatwave in the Red Sea

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

I congratulate the authors that this has potential to be an important paper of very great interest to the air sea flux community (certainly to me!), exploiting the very valuable set of SST data to address the marine heat waves in the red sea.
The topic of the manuscript is highly relevant in the actual context of Special Issue "Sea Surface Temperature: From Observation to Applications", and it falls well within the scope of the JMSE.
I am not a native English speaker, and I have listed a few typos below.  
For instance, it would have been nice to investigate in detail the behaviour of the sea surface radiation budget with the marine heat waves. The  I believe the analysis could have been pushed slightly further to take advantage of the OSTIA SST products. The turbulent (latent and sensible) and the radiative (short wave and long wave) component are easily to get from NASA MERRA-2 or ECMWF ERA-5.

I only have two major and a few minor comments.

Figure 4, 7 and 8
Please use high resolution figures. I can not see the deails in these figures.

Lines 348-349
A scatter plot shows the chlor_a concentration with MHW anomalies would be useful.

Lines 361
Why use the accumulation intensity of MHW? 251.3˚C is a large number. The accumulation dates are 26 days in the third study case, and you use 98 days in the fourth case. I think it's better to use the mean intensity.

Minor comments:

Lines 127-128
Add the "date of access" after the link.

Line 355:
"sever" should be "severe" 

Line 357:
"missed of" should be "missed" 

Define the abbreviation at the first time when it is used in the text; also no need to define abbreviation twice. The authour should check it thoroughly. For example:
Line 200:
Remove the definition of abbreviation "ENSO", already defined at Line 144
LineS 144,205,273,396:
Remove the definition of abbreviation "MHW", already defined at Line 37
Line 327:
Remove the definition of abbreviation "ISMI", already defined at Line 153

Author Response

Dear Reviewer, 1

Thank you so much for your valuable comments, which improve our manuscripts and helps a lot to know more about MHW characteristics over the Red Sea (please find the attached file for the detailed response to your valuable comments).

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

The manuscript is interesting, and shows the new results of the heat waves in the sea. 
The first part of the manuscript, including section 3.1 and part of section 3.2 (L245 - L296), is written correctly, there are no statistical errors. 
The second part of Section 3.2, including the teleconnection indices, is problematic. All the statistics and conclusions come from Figures 6 and 7. The figures are very confusing and do not focus on the main objective. The authors need to improve the section by adding new figures or tables and new text to support the teleconnection. I suggest avoiding sentences like "There is clear evidence that the higher annual averaged MHWs intensity values are related to El Niño periods (Fig. 6a)." What is clear evidence?
Figure 3. please use the same colour bar.
Figure 8. please comment on the spike data in Chl-a concentration. Chlorophyll bloom? 
The manuscript contains a large number of typos.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer, 2

Thank you so much for your valuable comments, which improve our manuscripts and helps a lot to know more about MHW characteristics over the Red Sea (please find the attached file for the detailed response to your valuable comments).

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

The authors have adequately addressed my comments in this updated version. 
The paper is overall much improved and I believe it can be accepted as is.

Reviewer 2 Report

The authors answer to all my questions