Check out the arrant difference between these two satellite images , taken on March 19 , 2010 and March 19 , 2011 . The left image shows much more ozone ( in red ) over the Arctic than the correct image . What ’s happened ?
These maps number from NASA’sOzone Monitoring Instrument ( OMI ) , aboard theAurasatellite . The two image severalize a austere taradiddle of rapid ozone depletion . OMI uses a spectrometer that measures the amount of sun scattered by Earth ’s air and Earth’s surface , which gives a sense of how much ozone survive at different levels , including the stratosphere .
Here ’s an spiritedness which show the dynamic of the ozone bed from January 1 to March 23 in both 2010 and 2011 :
In mid - March , scientists from the Alfred Wegener Institute reported that Arctic ozone levels had been edit out in half towards the goal of wintertime , base on datum from 30 ozone - go station around the neighborhood .
The skillful news is , Arctic ozone level fluctuate from class to year , and ozone “ holes ” do n’t form as systematically as they do in the Antarctic . It remains to be seen whether this ozone depletion will actually direct to increases in the strength of ultraviolet radiation in the Arctic . Says Paul Newman with NASA ’s Goddard Space Flight Center , “ We need to expect and see if this will really bump … It ’s something to look at but it is not catastrophic . ”
But still , the question of why ozone levels dropped so starkly this year remains , and nobody has a effective solution . There are still a lot of ozone - use up chemicals like chlorofluorocarbon in the atmosphere , despite their regulation by the Montreal Protocol . It ’ll take a prospicient clip for the concentration of these chlorine to decline , because these chemical substance have a long lifespan . And the process of ozone depletion is compound when the stratosphere is particularly cold , which has been the case in late weeks .
say Newman :
Last wintertime , we had very high-pitched lower stratospheric temperatures and ozone levels were very high ; this yr is just the contrary . The real question is : Why is this year so dynamically quiet and inhuman in the stratosphere ? That ’s a big question with no salutary reply .
[ viaNASA Earth Observatory ]
EarthEcologyNASA
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