Description
Summary:International audience Future increases in the concentration of greenhouse gases and water vapour are likely to cool the stratosphere further and to increase the amount of polar stratospheric clouds (PSCs). Future Arctic PSC areas have been extrapolated using the highly significant trends in the temperature record from 1958?2001. Using a tight correlation between PSC area and the total vortex ozone depletion and taking the decreasing amounts of ozone depleting substances into account we make empirical estimates of future ozone. The result is that Arctic ozone losses increase until 2010?2020 and only decrease slightly up to 2030. This approach is an alternative method of prediction to that based on the complex coupled chemistry-climate models (CCMs).