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posted by martyb on Thursday February 08 2018, @06:41AM   Printer-friendly
from the faster-sun-tans^W-burns dept.

The ozone layer may be recovering above Antarctica, but not over the equator:

Thirty years after nations banded together to phase out chemicals that destroy stratospheric ozone, the gaping hole in the earth's ultraviolet (UV) radiation shield above Antarctica is shrinking. But new findings suggest that at mid-latitudes, where most people live, the ozone layer in the lower stratosphere is growing more tenuous--for reasons that scientists are struggling to fathom.

"I don't want people to panic or get overly worried," says William Ball, an atmospheric physicist at the Physikalisch-Meteorologisches Observatorium Davos World Radiation Centre in Switzerland. "But there is something happening in the lower stratosphere that's important to understand."

Several recent studies, including one published last month in Geophysical Research Letters, point to a robust recovery of stratospheric ozone concentrations over Antarctica--the long-awaited payoff after the Montreal Protocol in 1987 mandated a global phase-out of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and other ozone-eating compounds.

But recent evidence indicates that the global campaign to mend the ozone layer is far from over. In an analysis published today in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, Ball and colleagues combined satellite data to examine ozone at mid-latitudes, from Earth's surface on up through the troposphere and the stratosphere. They found that from 1998 to 2016, ozone in the lower stratosphere ebbed by 2.2 Dobson units--a measure of ozone thickness--even as concentrations in the upper stratosphere rose by about 0.8 Dobson units. "We saw it at almost every latitude and every altitude below about 25 kilometers," Ball says. "That made us very concerned that perhaps this was something very real that no one looked at before."

Also at the Imperial College London and Newsweek.

Evidence for a continuous decline in lower stratospheric ozone offsetting ozone layer recovery (open, DOI: 10.5194/acp-18-1379-2018) (DX)

Decline in Antarctic Ozone Depletion and Lower Stratospheric Chlorine Determined From Aura Microwave Limb Sounder Observations (DOI: 10.1002/2017GL074830) (DX)

Previously: Ozone Layer Hole at its Smallest Size Since 1988


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 08 2018, @07:11PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 08 2018, @07:11PM (#635129)

    So I take it the Global Warming myth is failing so they need a new boogieman.