My morning double take: "Arctic on the verge of record ozone loss"

For all those CFC fans
http://www.nature.com/news/2007/070924/full/449382a.html

Its that old ‘hot = cold’ thing again – gets you every time if you dont watch

The “scientists” behind this propaganda fail to understand the basic climate mechanisms in place.
The colder conditions experienced during the early and mid stages of the northern hemisphere winter were due to a warmer stratosphere which was a result of a weakened arctic vortex that was caused by planetary waves and the QBO. This situation causes a strongly neg AO/NAO with associated jet stream changes. (Mr Wilde might notice the different anomalies around 45km)
Lately we have seen a stronger northern vortex and a positive AO which cools the stratosphere aiding in ozone loss, winter conditions also improved during this time.
Low EUV is a double edged sword, some think EUV is a factor in the fluctuations of the planetary waves that destroy the arctic vortex along with the reduced capacity to build ozone. This is the area where the money should be spent.

Gavin says:
March 15, 2011 at 9:20 am
So, Gavin, how’s the Model E documentation coming along??? Sorry to interrupt your government-sponsored blogging…

“”””” Mike says:
March 15, 2011 at 1:08 pm
@Henry P
I read your article. There are no references to the scientific literature in it. This might explain why YOU were unable to find the mountains of evidence that CO2 (+ the H2O feedback) causes warming. You state that warming leads to more H2O vapor which is correct, but than assume this will increase cloud cover. That would hold if the temperature was constant which of course it is not since it is warming. There is a lot of uncertainty in cloud feedback. The small amount of direct evidence points toward the cloud feedback being positive – that is warming is amplified by warming induced cloud cover changes. There is no evidence that cloud cover will save us. So, do we just roll the dice and cross our figures? “””””
Mike, just think, you cloud be the first; excuse me, make that “could” be the first. The first that is, to actually observe the Temperature to rise in the shadow zone of a cloud when it passes in front of the sun. It ain’t happened yet; but it might. Just think, Carl Sagan went to meet his maker, having never found so much as one single binary digit of scientific observational data about any form of exta-terrestrial life, intelligent or otherwise. What a great waste of one’s life.
So you might be the first to witness a cloud warming the ground.
So if you had pole to pole total cloud cover from the surface to say 20 km or so; hell go for 50 km, just how hot would you expect it to get on the surface.
We have pretty good evidence, that any and every single molecule of H2O that is added to the earth’s atmosphere, anywhere on earth, at any altitude must result in a reduction of the amount of solar spectrum energy that reaches the earth surface to get stored in either the deep oceans, or the rocks or urban heat islands, or even in the interstices of snow covered ice. that in the long run shoulkd lead to a cooler earth.
Yes I know that a tall cloud near the limb of the earth can scatter, some incoming sunlight, that would have totally missed the surface as it scooted on by, and have that energy reach the surface. OOoops, I almost forgot, it is also likely that that very same cloud could scatter light that WAS going to hit the surface, and have it head on back out into space instead. I’d put my money on no net gain due to that cloud side scatter.
I’ve actually been under a midwestern thunderstorm, (inside) where it was quite dark even at mid day; and experienced the cooling due to that cloud blocking sunlight from the ground. Yes I did say inside, so I was not feeling the air Temperature of some external air mass associated with the storm; just the attenuation of the solar energy that was coming in my window, before the storm went through.
But it’s the high clouds that cause the surface warming isn’t it; you know the higher the better; because when they are high and very low density, they don’t block as much sunlight from the ground. Of course they also don’t block much in the way of outgoing LWIR radiation for precisely the same reason (sparseness). Those noctilucent clouds can really cook you if you get outside when they are around.
Does the inverse square law not operate in the optics of the earth’s cloud system. A 100 square km dense cloud casts about a 100 square km shadow on the surface, because the sun is a near point source (half a degree angular diameter), so there is a bit of a penumbral edge to the shadow. On the other hand, the surface emitted LWIR radiation from that cooler shadow zone, radiates in at least a Lambertian (cosine) radiation pattern and maybe, even closer to isotropic, so only a fraction of that surface LWIR is actually intercepted by the 100 square km cloud. And you have an inverse 4th power of cloud height operating, not to mention a cosine ^8 possible obliquity factor as well. Yeah that cloud is going to be a real blow torch.

Could we please introduce a little basic science here? First, there are no “holes in the ozone layer” for the very simple reason that there is no “ozone layer”, except as a mathematical construct.
Ozone concentrations in the atmosphere are measured in Dobson Units, which measure the total amount of ozone in a column of air from ground level up to the outer reaches of the atmosphere.
This total measure is then ASSUMED to exist as a “layer” at sea level to produce a figure that can be used to compare ozone concentrations from one place to another. This totally man-made mathematical construct is the ONLY place where an actual “ozone layer” exists.
Ozone is an allotrope of oxygen, O3 instead of O2. It is formed when O2 is subject to an input of energy. Lightning creates ozone, as do electric motors. The bulk of ozone is formed from sunlight striking O2 molecules. Obviously this happens most where the two first meet – way out in the upper reaches of the atmosphere – but it also occurs all the way down to sea level.
The truth is, if we could build a giant space vacuum-cleaner and vacuum up all the ozone in the upper atmosphere, it would be instantly replaced by more ozone being formed by more sunlight hitting more oxygen (O2) molecules. This process will continue for as long as there are O2 molecules rising up from the earth, meeting light coming from the sun.
Ozone concentrations are measured in Dobson Units, because they are measured on a Dobson Spectrophotometer, invented by Professor Gordon Dobson. Professor Dobson believed there were high-level wind-currents and wanted to test his theory by tracking the large scale movement of air in the upper atmosphere.
Since it is very hard to actually “tag” air to see where it goes, Professor Dobson decided to make use of a known, observable fact at the time (1957). Back then, in pre “post-modern” science days, it was fully understood that ozone was caused by sunlight striking O2, and that there was less of it at the poles during winter. In fact, there shouldn’t have been any. (I’ll let the reader figure out why).
However, there was some, when there should have been none, so Professor Dobson theorised that the ozone was being carried in from “elsewhere” by his theorised upper-atmospheric wind currents. Professor Dobson theorised that if he could “map” the pattern of this incoming ozone he could establish the existence of these upper atmospheric wind systems.
And that is exactly what he did. In 1957 – The International Geophysical Year – he mapped the patterns of ozone depletion over Antarctica, and established the existence and general movements of the upper-atmosphere air currents. For this he was awarded the “International Geophysical Man of the Year” award (sorry ladies, but that is what it was called).
Professor Dobson wrote a book about this – “Exploring the Atmosphere” – which was one of my science textbooks at high school back in the Sixties. Regrettably, since Professor Dobson’s work did not fit the required “post-modern” paradigm of man-made “holes” in the “ozone layer” he has largely been “disappeared” from history, despite being one of the giants of modern meteorology.
This started in the late Sixties when the greenies were campaigning to stop the development of supersonic transport aircraft (SST) – namely the Lockheed L2000 and the Boeing 2707, which they succeeded in doing in 1971. It was claimed at the time that these kinds of aircraft would “burn holes in the ozone layer” and all our atmosphere would “leak out”. Or something like that.
Anyway, that’s how I remember it. Forgive me any minor scientific or historical errors, for I am a simple man with nary but a high school education on the subject of “climate science” and a failing memory to work with.

Gavin says:
March 15, 2011 at 9:20 am
A clue:
Minimum temperatures in the Arctic stratosphere
http://acdb-ext.gsfc.nasa.gov/Data_services/met/ann_data.html
are below the levels for PSC formation (and halogen-related catalytic ozone depletion via heterogeneous chemistry), which allows for very confident predictions of large springtime ozone loss. See 2005 for similar conditions and predictions:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/03/will-spring-2005-be-a-bad-one-for-arctic-ozone/
and validation:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/05/2005-arctic-ozone-loss/
but please carry on…
===========
Thanks for the link and I hate it when I’m so wrong and need to correct a post.
I did search all of NASA using advanced search and got 5 results for Arctic Ozone Hole (3 from 1997). However, there is a truckload on Antarctica.
http://search.nasa.gov/nasasearch/search/advSearch.jsp?start=&filter=0&spell=&nasaInclude=Arctic+Ozone+Hole&qt=all&qx=&qm=title&dtype=on&dn1=&dn=nasa.gov&dt=at&recPerPg=200&displayFormat=detail
Ozone Monitoring Instrument [Satellite] Names 1978 – present:
OMI
(Aura) Ozone Monitoring Instrument
2004 – present
TOMS
Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer
• Nimbus-7 (11/1/1978 – 5/6/1993)
• Meteor-3 (8/22/1991 – 11/24/1994)
• Earth Probe (7/25/1996 – 12/31/2005)
SBUV
(See also NOAA’s stratospheric ozone page on SBUV/2, NASA Goddard’s page on Nimbus 7 SBUV, and NOAA’s SBUV/2 web site.)
Solar Backscatter UltraViolet
1978 – present
GOME
Global Ozone Monitoring Experiment
1995 – present
GOME-2
Global Ozone Monitoring Experiment
2006 – present
Data is available for 1978-2005
http://toms.gsfc.nasa.gov/ftpimage_v8.html
Also see, Spaced Based Measurements of Ozone — 2004 to present
http://macuv.gsfc.nasa.gov/OMIOzone.md
Other related links:
NASA [Antarctica] Ozone Hole Watch
http://ozonewatch.gsfc.nasa.gov/
Ozone and Air Quality
http://macuv.gsfc.nasa.gov/
What is the Ozone Hole?
Each year for the past few decades during the Southern Hemisphere spring, chemical reactions involving chlorine and bromine cause ozone in the southern polar region to be destroyed rapidly and severely. This depleted region is known as the “ozone hole”.
The area of the ozone hole is determined from a map of total column ozone. It is calculated from the area on the Earth that is enclosed by a line with a constant value of 220 Dobson Units. The value of 220 Dobson Units is chosen since total ozone values of less than 220 Dobson Units were not found in the historic observations over Antarctica prior to 1979. Also, from direct measurements over Antarctica, a column ozone level of less than 220 Dobson Units is a result of the ozone loss from chlorine and bromine compounds.
Based on this, its actually curious that it doesn’t routinely occur in the Northern Hemisphere spring s well.

memoryvault. Good to see Gordon Dobson’s name mentioned and some straight common sense info.
I’d add that the instability of O3 makes it particularly prone to break-down by Cl. High latitude, cool climate volcanoes like Mt Erebus or the 4 recent Kamchatka ones, sometimes send hot gasses straight up to the stratosphere where they decompress/expand and hang around for a fair while. This might be an obvious avenue to investigate.
From memory they found precious little CFC in the Antarctic atmosphere which is hardly surprizing given its high density. However, they did find plenty of Cl in the stratosphere.

Well let’s see. Solomon, ozone, ghgs, Schmidt, so much going on at once, maybe we can sort it out some.
In this paper by Thompson and Solomon (T&S), some considerable effort is made to separate the effect of ozone recovery (should cause stratospheric warming) from ghgs (stratospheric cooling).
http://www.atmos.colostate.edu/ao/ThompsonPapers/ThompsonSolomon2_JClimate2009.pdf
In order to do so best, it was found necessary to look at stratospheric trends by lattitude, and this comment was made:

The stratosphere is cooling at all latitudes, but the cooling is most significant at tropical latitudes and is obscured by a string of relatively warm years since 2000 at polar latitudes (Fig. 3b; Fig. 5, middle; Fig. 6) [see also Thompson and Solomon (2005)].

We’ll leave aside for the moment the fact that Figs 3b, 5, and 6 appear to actually show the higher lattitudes (i.e. the Arctic) warming. albeit with huge error bars that extend into cooling, but I can only deal with so much climate science at a time.
Rather, I’d like to focus on this additional quote from T&S:

The most obvious physical explanation for the pattern of ozone-residual temperature trends in Fig. 7 (bottom) is that the radiative cooling due to ozone depletion is being attenuated by anomalous sinking motion in the polar regions and is being enhanced by anomalous rising motion in the tropics, subtropics, and even midlatitudes of both hemispheres.

Their explanation required them to account for the fact that the polar regions weren’t cooling enough. They had a perfect explanation…in 2009…to explain why polar stratospheric temperatures weren’t cooling according to plan.
I guess it would be interesting to know why one year now proves the arctic stratosphere is cooling because of ghgs, just as the all models say!
Maybe the actual data will clear things up?
http://www1.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/cmb/temp-and-precip/upper-air/rss_monthly_msu_amsu_channel_tls_anomalies_land_and_ocean.txt
Here’s the trend for the high lattitudes.
First, year round
http://img824.imageshack.us/i/arctictlsstatospheremon.jpg/
then for feb only, which presumably indicates how likely ozone depletion will be in the Northern spring.
http://img843.imageshack.us/i/arctictlsstatospherefeb.jpg/
There’s that pesky warming again.
Maybe Gavin can come back and explain these trends to us.

JPA Knowles
Yes, the relative density of CFC’s to air is about the same as that of a house brick to water. One doesn’t often see house bricks floating to the surface of pools.
The entire “CFC’s are destroying the (non-existent) ozone layer” construct was the brainchild of one Edgar Bronfman Sr who picked up the entire bill for that little shindig in Canada from where we got the Montreal Protocol.
It’s actually quite entertaining sitting here reading all this.
119 comments (so far) on “holes” that don’t exist, in a “layer” that doesn’t exist, and a mountain of quotes from and links to “published, peer-reviewed scientific papers”, all debating the “causes” of a purely natural phenomenon that occurs over the Poles every (local) winter because the sun doesn’t shine at the time – hence no formation of ozone.
It really IS that simple.

Stratosphere temperatures are clearly controlled by stratospheric volcanic eruptions.
When a large volcano goes off, within 2 weeks, stratospheric temperatures spike as the sulfate aerosols rise up and then capture more solar radiation in the stratospheric layer. (Surface solar radiation falls in concert of course).
After the sulfate aerosols dissappate, they leave behind in their wake, reduced Ozone levels as the sulfate aerosols destroy Ozone. Temperatures in the stratosphere then decline to a new lower level about 0.5C to 1.0C lower than prior to the eruption.
Afterward, it takes 30 to 50 years for the Ozone to rebuild and the temperature in the stratosphere slowly rebuilds as the Ozone level rebuilds.
This can be seen in the daily UAH lower stratosphere temperatures since 1979 and are evident in all the stratospheric volcanoes that we have been able to measure.
http://img232.imageshack.us/img232/29/lowerstratospheretemps.png
For the Arctic, there seems to be not too much happening except in the Winter, between December to February, the stratosphere temperatures can either spike up a large amount or spike down a large amount. All the spikes in the following chart occur in December to March, with the most common centre point of the spike in February.
http://img37.imageshack.us/img37/1954/uahnorthpolesstrat.png
So, there is NO explanation of these events required that involve CO2 at all (and the pro-AGW movement is taking advantage of volcano influences an normal Arctic stratosphere variability to bolster their case – which they seem to do consistently with everything that happens).