Interactive comment on “ Daily scale wintertime sea surface temperature variability and the Iberian Poleward Current in the southern Bay of Biscay from 1981 to 2010 ” by G

This manuscript exploits the long-term remote SST observation series from AVHRR Pathfinder data to reveal the variability of the Iberian Poleward Current (IPC) in the Bay of Biscay (BoB) and, with the help of reanalyses of atmospheric fields, to propose a suite of mechanisms explaining this variability. After a description of the various data sets used in the study, the authors briefly describe the methodology employed to extend the coverage of the winter SST maps, called DINEOF (Beckers and Rixen, 2003). The resulting dataset is evaluated in comparison with the non-extended dataset, and with independent in situ data. The satisfying comparison allows the authors to use the extended dataset for investigating the IPC signature in SST. They find that the first EOF mode of the decomposition of the winter SST anomalies with respect to a 15-day