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What was measured. Total ozone, 1980–2020, and a cosmic-ray-driven electron model drawn through it. Their “hole” is a lower-stratospheric loss greater than 25 percent relative to an undisturbed atmosphere, not the 220 Dobson-unit threshold.

What it does to the budget. The paper says a tropical hole has existed since the 1980s, all year, with an area about seven times the Antarctic hole and a comparable depth, and that Antarctic and tropical loss share one mechanism which their electron model fits. Read the axes on their own figure. Antarctic spring total ozone falls from about 340 to near 220 Dobson units. The tropical annual total column falls by about 10 Dobson units, from the low 270s into the low 260s. The dramatic tropical hole is a redefined partial-column percentage, not the quantity used for the Antarctic hole. Two descriptions of the same observations, and they do not agree on what a hole is.

The annual points and the cosmic-ray model curve were not released as a table. Redrawing them from the printed figure would be a guess. What the axes do show, and what this ledger already states, is the scale: the Antarctic panel covers a fall of roughly a hundred Dobson units, and the tropical annual panel covers about ten. That is a different definition of a hole, not a second copy of the Antarctic record.