The authors have properly adressed the comments of the reviewers. I have some remaining suggestions I would like the authors to include before accepting the paper.

The Holton-Tan mechanisms explains the influence of the QBO on the strength of polar vortex via wave forcing. This is however, a non-local effect, thus not "in the polar region". I therefore suggest to rephrase the statement in the conclusions section to something like: "the QBO modulating Antarctic ozone loss are also via its wave-forcinge effect on the polar region (i.e. the Holton-Tan effect)"

In Figure 5, detrended polar ozone column values of less than 100 DU are shown. Please specify more clearly what this is, as certainly the November ozone column is not below 100 DU.

Technical:
The new sentence summarizing Figure 1 in response to rev. 1 comments is very long. I suggest to break up into at least two sentences.

Rev. 1 remarked that the term "gradient of the trend" should be avoided. I agree with this statement. The replacement with slope of the trend is however not better. In mathematical terms, the slope of a trend would be the second derivative. Please simply use positive or negative trend.

The use of "previous winter" is still confusing, as you are referring to the same year. I suggest that the use of "respective" winter may be clearer, inparticular if you refer to November values. In case you explicitley refer to spring (and not to Novenber), the term "proceeding winter" would also be clear.

Andreas Engel (co-editor)

I have checked all of the corrections and I am happy with the changes you made. The only remanining point from my side is the y-axis in Fig. 5. Please check if the cosine averaging has been applied correctly and the values are correctly normalized.

Andreas Engel (assoc. editor).

I have checked the track changed manuscript and it appears to me that Figure 5, as well as the Figure caption are unchanged from the previous version. Figure 5 still shows the unexplainable low Ozone column values. Could it be that you have by mistake uploaded a previous version?
best regards, Andreas Engel

dear authors,

thank you very much; also the track-changed manuscript is now fine.