Reply to Interactive comment on “A volumetric census of the Barents Sea in a changing climate” by

The manuscript describes a data set of available temperature and salinity mapped to a regular grid in the Barents Sea. The mapping is not described in detail, but instead reference is made to a publicly available software DIVA. Some error estimates of the mapped fields are also provided with the data set, but the estimation procedure is not described. The mapped data is used to perform some basic analyses of temperature and salinity trends in the Barents Sea. This paper presents a novel temperature and salinity datasets that is presented on a regular grid for the Barents Sea, which are “constructed” from the available datasets. It also presents basic analysis of the thermohaline trends that are showing the state of the Barents Sea. The manuscript is well written and is easy to follow. For these reasons, I think that presented manuscript has a potential for the publication in the ESSD. We positive our work. However, I have some concerns manuscript, when comes to the description of the used methods to “construct” the maps of temperature and salinity. In the manuscript, the the DIVA software package, however I am missing the details on the used methods and the existing data. My other main concern is the coverage (in space and time) of the used thermohaline data, as well as for the final gridded maps, that were not clearly described in the manuscript, and for which I think that is important for the reader to understand your choice of analysis that are limited to seasons, years and/or regions. Altogether, I recommend this manuscript for the publication after the major revisions. Abstract. Due to its location The Barents (cid:58)(cid:58)(cid:58)(cid:58) Sea, (cid:58)(cid:58)(cid:58)(cid:58)(cid:58)(cid:58) located between the Norwegian Sea and the Arctic Ocean, the Barents Sea is one of the main pathways of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation. Changes in its water masses (cid:58)(cid:58) the (cid:58)(cid:58)(cid:58)(cid:58)(cid:58) water mass transformations in the Barents (cid:58)(cid:58)(cid:58)(cid:58) Sea potentially affect the thermohaline circulation through the alteration of the dense water formation process. In order to prospect (cid:58)(cid:58)(cid:58)(cid:58)(cid:58)(cid:58)(cid:58)(cid:58)(cid:58) investigate (cid:58) such changes, we present here a seasonal atlas of the Barents Sea including both temperature 5 and salinity for the period 1965–2016. The atlas is built as a compilation of datasets from the World Ocean Database, the Polar Branch of Russian Federal Research Institute of Fisheries and Oceanography, and the Norwegian Polar Institute using the Data-Interpolating Variational Analysis (DIVA) tool. DIVA allows for a minimization of the expected error with respect to the true ﬁeld. The atlas is used to provide a volumetric analysis of water mass characteristics and an estimation of the ocean heat and freshwater contents. The results show a recent "Atlantiﬁcation" of the Barents Sea, i.e. (cid:58)(cid:58)(cid:58) that (cid:58)(cid:58) is (cid:58) a general increase of both 10 temperature and salinity, while its density remains stable. The atlas is made freely accessible as user-friendly NetCDF ﬁles to encourage further research in the Barents Sea physics (https://doi.org/10.21335/NMDC-2058021735, Watelet et al. (2020)). This research provides a comprehensive atlas of temperature and salinity covering the whole BS with an emphasis on its MRA. Although the in–situ in situ data is sometimes scarce on in this part of the Arctic, we show here that much physical information can still be extracted from compiled databases provided by using a variational method minimising the expected errors on the resulting ﬁeldsis used . The results