Review of Manuscript by Gordon et al.

Abstract

General comments: This study seeks to apply dissolved oxygen measurements from profiling floats to estimate primary production and respiration from diel oxygen cycles. The study region in the shelf break region of the northern Gulf of Mexico is a challenging environment for this approach because it is a region of low productivity, but high physical variability and thus is a good testbed to evaluate the limits of diel approaches. Further, near 30 N the Coriolis frequency is approximately 24-hours and near-inertial oscillations can confound biologically-driven diurnal cycles. In general, this study found that physical variability was too great to allow for robust estimates of biological rates in C1