Letters to the Editor Ozone Hole Split Letters to the Editor The Southern Hemisphere Ozone Hole Split in 2002

Among the most important aspects of the atmospheric pollution problem are the anthropogenic impacts on the stratospheric ozone layer, the related trends of the total ozone content drop and the solar ultraviolet radiation enhancement at the Earth's surface level. During September 2002, the ozone...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Costas Varotsos
Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
Format: Text
Language:English
Subjects:
Online Access:http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.505.7085
http://www.unep.ch/ozone/pdf/the-southern-hemisphere-ozone-hole-split-2002.pdf
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Summary:Among the most important aspects of the atmospheric pollution problem are the anthropogenic impacts on the stratospheric ozone layer, the related trends of the total ozone content drop and the solar ultraviolet radiation enhancement at the Earth's surface level. During September 2002, the ozone hole over the Antarctic was much smaller than in the previous six years. It has split into two separate holes, due to the appearance of sudden stratospheric warming that has never been observed before in the southern hemisphere. The analysis of this unprecedented event is attempted, regarding both the meteorological and photochemical aspects, in terms of the unusual thermal field patterns and the induced polar vortex disturbances. Introduction. The total ozone content (TOC) observations currently performed by the Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer (TOMS) flown on the NASA Earth Probe satellite and the NOAA-16 Solar Backscatter Ultraviolet instrument (SBUV/2) showed that the size of the Antarctic