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Abstract We consider the Cauchy problem for the logarithmically singular surface quasi-geostrophic (SQG) equation, introduced by Ohkitani,$$\begin{aligned} \begin{aligned} \partial _t \theta - \nabla ^\perp \log (10+(-\Delta )^{\frac{1}{2}})\theta \cdot \nabla \theta = 0, \end{aligned} \end{aligned}$$ $\begin{array}{c}\begin{array}{c}{\partial }_t\theta -{\nabla }^{\perp }log(10+{(-\Delta )}^{\frac{1}{2}})\theta ·\nabla \theta =0,\end{array}\end{array}$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$$\delta $$ $\delta$-SQG equations, defined by$$\begin{aligned} \begin{aligned} \partial _t \theta + \nabla ^\perp (10+(-\Delta )^{\frac{1}{2}})^{-\delta }\theta \cdot \nabla \theta = 0, \end{aligned} \end{aligned}$$ $\begin{array}{c}\begin{array}{c}{\partial }_t\theta +{\nabla }^{\perp }{(10+{(-\Delta )}^{\frac{1}{2}})}^{-\delta }\theta ·\nabla \theta =0,\end{array}\end{array}$for all sufficiently small$$\delta >0$$ $\delta >0$depending on the size of the initial data. For the same range of$$\delta $$ $\delta$, we establish global well-posedness of smooth solutions to the dissipative SQG equations.