Interactive comment on “Nutritive and photosynthetic ecology of subsurface chlorophyll maxima in the Canadian Arctic waters” by J. Martin et al

3) Comment: The authors state that SCM contribute largely to “total water column” production; the depth for which they have estimated production is only given for one station (and it is 71 m. The depth of the water column at the sampling stations is not indicated in the paper. Response: Actually, 71 m is not the depth of the water column for station 303 but the depth of the euphotic zone. Nevertheless, your comment made us realize that the bathymetry is missing in Fig.1. We added it to the figure. Introduction 4) Comment: Temperature is mentioned in the abstract, results and discussion but does not appear in the introduction or as a question for the work. Response: Indeed. We apologize for the oversight and added a presentation of temperature effects to the introduction. C3169 Methods 5) Comment: Sampling: since assumptions are made for the whole water column, the “standard depths” should be explicitly mentioned here (P 6448, L 26). Response: The depths are 5, 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 100, 125, 150, 175, 200, 250, 300 m and then every 100 m unless the Arctic halocline was identified. In this case, sampling in the 100–200 m range occurred at every 20 m and at a salinity of 33.1 to capture the nutrient maximum. We added this information to the Sampling section. 6) Comment: The 2.1 “Sampling” section could be combined with some of the analyses that are standard procedures described in the following sections. For example, combine the section on nutrients in paragraph 2.1 with 2.2, and Chl-a and Fv/Fm in 2.1 with 2.3. Response: Done. 7) Comment: Section 2.5 is entitled “sensor calibrations” but only the reference to Martin et al. 2010 is mentioned. “Calibration” should be omitted from the title. Z of SCM and of the nitracline are not really “transformations” either, and could be added in the Chl-a and nutrients paragraphs, respectively. If N2 is Brunt-Väisälä frequency, this should be stated. Response: We changed the title of section 2.5 to remove the mention of calibrations. C3170 We included the Brunt-Väisälä frequency. 8) Comment: Some of N-uptake parameters present pretty high errors (such as DB, Page 6452, L.4). The errors presented correspond to which of the two methods used to calculate it? Response: The error on irradiance-uptake parameters is the standard deviation estimated by SigmaPlot for the fitting of the empirical exponential models (Platt et al. 1980 or Webb et al. 1974). 9) Comment: Indicate the software used for statistical analyses. Response: We used SigmaPlot 11. Added to the text.