Dear authors;

my apologies for the long time it took to get reviews for you manuscript. You can guess that it is quite difficult to find reviewers with expertise in ocean dynamics and in theory of entropy etc. who are as independent from your group as possible.

While the reviews are in principle positive, the reviewers raised several points concerning the description of earlier work and the explanation of the theory. The reviewers had problems in following the theory even right from the beginning where you are stating the first balance equation. After checking this on my own, I share these concerns. The terms in the context of energy, power, angular momentum, moment of force (= torque) and moment are indeed not used consistently. It might even look to the reader as if angular momentums and energies were mixed in Eq. (1). Taking these problems into account, I am even not sure whether any of the reviewers had the chance to recapitulate and check the theory completely.

I would therefore request a thorough reworking of the theoretical part with particular care to the points raised by the reviewers. Beyond this, a clearer explanation and a deeper discussion of the relationship of your concept to previous research and what the progress coming from the principle of maximum entropy production is would be important. From your responses to the comments I can see that you are probably
able and willing to provide a revised version addressing the concerns.

Looking forward to seeing a revised version,
Stefan Hergarten

Dear authors;

thank you very much for revising your manuscript. As far as I can see, the explanation of the relationship to previous research has indeed been improved much.

However, I am not still not satisfied with the explanation of the theory where my feeling was that both reviewers were not able to check it completely as there were some problems in understanding right from the start. If I understand your approach correctly, the idea with the balance of torque is new compared to your previous paper on the estuaries. Although you introduced some improvement here, I still got stuck at several places, and I am afraid that many readers will also.

I would therefore request a more thorough revision of section 2. Please use the following questions as some guideline:
Line 5: What does "accelerating energy" mean?
Lines 6 and 9: "energy dissipation" sounds as if N_fric was an energy. Torques and energies cannot be balanced in one equation.
Line 6: Explain better what the meaning of M_ex is.
Line 10: N_fric can be balanced in Eq. (1) only if it is a torque. But then, l_m should
be some kind of arm and I do not understand how it is related to the depth (line 22).
Lines 20-22: It looks to me as it the factor 2 was duplicate; once in the area, and once in l_m.
Lines 24-27: I do not understand why q and v can be treated as separate properties. I would guess that, if either E increases or T decreases, the flow velocity would also increase. If so, the shear stress \tau would in fact be proportional to v^2, while you assume laminar flow where \tau ~ v.

As far as I can see, the calculations become clearer after this point. However, everything relies on the first 4 equations. I would therefore request you to explain them in such a way that I can be completely sure that they are correct, and that at least readers with a solid background in physics can follow your reasoning.

I apologize for sending you on an additional round of revision, but in my opinion these aspects are crucial for the quality and for the readability of your paper.

Looking forward to seeing another revised version,
Stefan

Dear authors;

sorry for the long time it took to process your manuscript. Finally the problem was that I did not get a response from one of the reviewers involved in the first round, so that I finally decided to check your revisions myself in addition to the second referee. Based on this review and on my own evaluation, I think that the paper should be published.

There was just one technical point the referee noted concerning Fig. 1. The symbol in the figure is still N_{fri}, while it should be M_{fric} according to the rewritten theory. I would ask you to correct this before submitting the production files.

All the best, and again sorry for the long time
Stefan