We consider the Cauchy problem for the logarithmically singular surface quasi-geostrophic (SQG) equation, introduced by Ohkitani, \(\begin{aligned} \begin{aligned} \partial _t \theta - \nabla ^\perp \log (10+(-\Delta )^{\frac{1}{2}})\theta \cdot \nabla \theta = 0, \end{aligned} \end{aligned}\) and establish local existence and uniqueness of smooth solutions in the scale of Sobolev spaces with exponent decreasing with time. Such a decrease of the Sobolev exponent is necessary, as we have shown in the companion paper (Chae et al. in Illposedness via degenerate dispersion for generalized surface quasi-geostrophic equations with singular velocities, arXiv:2308.02120) that the problem is strongly ill-posed in any fixed Sobolev spaces. The time dependence of the Sobolev exponent can be removed when there is a dissipation term strictly stronger than log. These results improve wellposedness statements by Chae et al. (Comm Pure Appl Math 65(8):1037–1066, 2012). This well-posedness result can be applied to describe the long-time dynamics of the \(\delta \) -SQG equations, defined by \(\begin{aligned} \begin{aligned} \partial _t \theta + \nabla ^\perp (10+(-\Delta )^{\frac{1}{2}})^{-\delta }\theta \cdot \nabla \theta = 0, \end{aligned} \end{aligned}\) for all sufficiently small \(\delta >0\) depending on the size of the initial data. For the same range of \(\delta \) , we establish global well-posedness of smooth solutions to the dissipative SQG equations.
