Arctic on the verge of an ozone hole?

• Main Authors: Kuttippurath, Jayanarayanan, Feng, Wuhu, Müller, Rolf, Kumar, Pankaj, Raj, Sarath, Gopikrishnan, Gopalakrishna Pillai, Roy, Raina
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: 2021
• Subjects: Antarctic; Arctic; Antarc*; Climate change
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-2020-1313; https://acp.copernicus.org/preprints/acp-2020-1313/

Severe vortex-wide ozone loss in the Arctic would expose nearly 650 million people and ecosystem to unhealthy ultra-violet radiation levels. Adding to these worries, and extreme weather events as the harbingers of climate change, clear signature of an ozone hole (ozone column values below 220 DU) appeared over the Arctic in March and April 2020. Sporadic occurrences of ozone hole values at different regions of vortex for almost three weeks were found for the first time in the observed history in the Arctic. Furthermore, a record-breaking ozone loss of about 2.0–3.4 ppmv triggered by an unprecedented chlorine activation (1.5–2.2 ppbv) matching to the levels of Antarctic ozone hole conditions was also observed. The polar processing situation led to the first-ever appearance of loss saturation in the Arctic. Apart from these, there were also ozone-mini holes in December 2019 and January 2020 driven by atmospheric dynamics. The large loss in ozone in the colder Arctic winters is intriguing and that demands rigorous monitoring of the region. Our study suggests that the very colder Arctic winters in near future would also very likely to experience even more ozone loss and encounter ozone hole situations, provided the stratospheric chlorine levels still stay high there.