Closure to “On the Failure of the Area Metric for Validation Exercises of Stochastic Simulations” (Eça, L., Dowding, K., and Roache, P. J., 2022, ASME J. Verif., Validation, Uncertainty Quantif., 7(4), p. 041005)

The comment by Oberkampf and Hristov [1] argues that our paper [2] is conceptually incorrect, but the three points raised in the beginning of their comment (first paragraph) to justify such a statement are not demonstrated.A significant amount of the discussion included in their comment is related to topics that are not addressed in our paper, as for example, the effect of statistical convergence or their opinion on seven desirable features for any validation metrics.Nonetheless, we provide here a high-level response to their comment and try to correct the misrepresentations in their comment.As a high-level response to their comment, we will focus on the perspective of the identified decision maker which was noted in their comment.Our paper provided examples and supporting evidence to demonstrate the following: The evaluation of the Area Metric, when presented to a decision maker as quantifying "the difference in all statistical moments," is in fact equivalent in many practical cases to only quantifying the difference in means (a single moment) when the distributions exhibit minimal overlap.This evaluation highlights the failure of the Area Metric and the need to carefully consider the overlap of distributions when interpreting the usefulness of the metric.Additionally, our paper quantifies the conditions that define small overlap and proposes an alternative area metric to address this shortcoming of the Area Metric.Next, we elaborate on the objectives of our paper and misrepresentation in their comment.