From the European Space Agency, a story of significant cold and wind patterns that have created an ozone “hole” in the Arctic where there normally isn’t one. The last time this happened was in 1997. It isn’t really a “hole” as you can see in the graphic below there are reduced levels of ozone, but nothing anywhere near zero.
Record loss of ozone over Arctic
ESA’s Envisat satellite has measured record low levels of ozone over the Euro-Atlantic sector of the northern hemisphere during March.
Download:
HI-RES MP4 (Size: 1381 kb)
This record low was caused by unusually strong winds, known as the polar vortex, which isolated the atmospheric mass over the North Pole and prevented it from mixing with air in the mid-latitudes.
This led to very low temperatures and created conditions similar to those that occur every southern hemisphere winter over the Antarctic.
As March sunlight hit this cold air mass it released chlorine and bromine atoms – ozone-destroying gases that originate from chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and break ozone down into individual oxygen molecules – predominantly in the lower stratosphere, around 20 km above the surface.
Ozone is a protective atmospheric layer found at around 25 km altitude that acts as a sunlight filter shielding life on Earth from harmful ultraviolet rays, which can harm marine life and increase the risk of skin cancer and cataracts.
Stratospheric temperatures in the Arctic show strong variations from winter to winter. Last year, temperatures and ozone above the Arctic were very high. The last unusually low stratospheric temperatures over the North Pole were recorded in 1997.
Scientists are investigating why the 2011 and 1997 Arctic winters were so cold and whether these random events are statistically linked to global climate change.
“In a changing climate, it is expected that on average stratospheric temperatures cool, which means more chemical ozone depletion will occur,” said Mark Weber from the University of Bremen.
“On the other hand, many studies show that the stratospheric circulation in the northern hemisphere may be enhanced in the future and, consequently, more ozone will be transported from the tropics into high latitudes and reduce ozone depletion.”
Answering this question requires more research on ozone modelling and ozone trend monitoring, which is only possible because of the historic satellite data on record. ESA’s Climate Change Initiative Programme has a project dedicated to this research.
“Measurements from the Envisat’s Sciamachy, MIPAS and GOMOS instruments are providing unique ozone information that is important in enabling scientists to separate chemical and dynamical changes and helping to identify the influence of climate change on the stratosphere. It is, therefore, essential to keep these instruments measuring for as long as possible,” said Weber.
Banned under the Montreal Protocol, CFCs have still not vanished from the air but are on the decline. Nevertheless, strong chemical ozone depletion will continue to occur in the coming decades during unusually cold Arctic winters.
I think we will find in the coming years that Polar Vortices, especially when they form and when they break down, play a very important role in Earth’s climate system. Note at the end (April 3rd) of the following animations, when the Northern pole becomes dominated by low pressure, the Southern pole becomes dominated by high pressure:
Northern Hemisphere – 500-hPa /mb Height (Pressure) Anomalies – At Approximately 5500 meters (18,000 feet)
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/intraseasonal/z500_nh_30d_anim.gif
Southern Hemisphere – 500-hPa /mb Height (Pressure) Anomalies – At Approximately 5500 meters (18,000 feet)
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/intraseasonal/z500_sh_30d_anim.gif
No conclusions to be drawn yet, but it’s two sides of the same coin, and when one pole is dominated but a large low pressure area, caused by a strong persistent Polar Vortex, it stands to reason that there would be a high pressure area somewhere on Earth to compensate.
A bit of background on Polar Vortices, “vortices are caused when an area of low pressure sits at the rotation pole of a planet. This causes air to spiral down from higher in the atmosphere, like water going down a drain. Any planet with an atmosphere, even the Earth, can form a vortex like this. Venus’ vortex is unusual because it has two eyes that rotate around each other.”
http://www.universetoday.com/973/what-venus-and-saturn-have-in-common/
“The vortex is most powerful in the hemisphere’s winter, when the temperature gradient is steepest, and diminishes or can disappear in the summer. The Antarctic polar vortex is more pronounced and persistent than the Arctic one; this is because the distribution of land masses at high latitudes in the northern hemisphere gives rise to Rossby waves which contribute to the breakdown of the vortex, whereas in the southern hemisphere the vortex remains less disturbed. The breakdown of the polar vortex is an extreme event known as a Sudden stratospheric warming, here the vortex completely breaks down and an associated warming of 30-50 degrees Celsius over a few days can occur. The Arctic vortex is elongated in shape, with two centres, one roughly over Baffin Island in Canada and the other over northeast Siberia. In rare events, the vortex can push further south as a result of axis interruption, see January 1985 Arctic outbreak.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polar_vortex
TruthSeeker says:
April 6, 2011 at 7:56 am
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/04/05/arctic-ozone-hole-in-march/#comment-636753
Correlation between Cosmic Rays and Ozone Depletion (4 pages. From March 2009.)
http://www.science.uwaterloo.ca/~qblu/Lu-2009PRL.pdf
@ur momisugly Cam_S says:
April 6, 2011 at 10:52 am
I like the way you linked back to a last comment . . . how did you do that?
>>David Evans
>>That’s because they’ve lumped BCF, (BromoChloroFluoromethane,) in with CFCs
But let’s not try to eliminate all BCFs.
BCFs are the only fire extinguishers powerful enough to put out a fire on an airliner, and if the Greens eliminate them (as they are trying to do) every flight will be more dangerous than ever before.
.
Bowen says:
April 6, 2011 at 11:34 am
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/04/05/arctic-ozone-hole-in-march/#comment-636890
The date under the comment is the link to the comment. 🙂
DaveE.
The end result of polar vortices seems to be understood when considering ozone destruction and the net affect on atmospheric teleconnections (AO/AAO). What is less understood is what drives the vortices and their origins. The planetary wave plus QBO in the north looks to be connected and follows seasonal patterns perhaps, but it’s a shame that more research money is not being spent here.
Everybody interested in a historical appraisal of the ozone dynamics in the Arctic and Antarctic regions should read the papers mentioned below. Both papers, one from 1950 and the other from 1990, suggest that such extreme rarefactions of the stratospheric ozone concentrations (below 200 dobson units) that became later known as the “ozone hole” were quite common over Northern Norway even before the CFCs were invented (in 1929 by Thomas Midgley), or over Antarctica during the International Geophysical Year, when they still were not largely used . One of the authors, American meteorologist Randolph Penndorf, even introduces the term “holes” to explain such low ozone readings. For me they provide enough evidence that this is another natural phenomenon that has been used to boost the political and economic agenda that gave us the Montreal Protocol, as a trial balloon for the Kyoto Protocol and all the warmist political agenda.
The mentioned papers are:
– R. Penndorf, “The annual variation of the amount of ozone over northern Norway”, Annales de géophysique, tome 6, fasc. 1, 1950, pp. 4-9.
– P. Rigaud and B. Leroy, “Presumptive evidence for a low value of the total ozone content above Antarctica in September, 1958”, Annales Geophysicae, 1990, 8(11), pp. 791-94.
“In a changing climate, it is expected that on average stratospheric temperatures cool, which means more chemical ozone depletion will occur,” said Mark Weber from the University of Bremen.
All changes in climate lead to stratospheric temperatures cooling, which mean more ozone depletion, and thus Global Warming can be blamed.
Does that mean that in all years since 1997, not including 2010, that the stratosphere warmed, ozone increased and there was Global Cooling?
Testing 1,2,3.
Let me get this right – 1997 is listed as both an incredibly warm year (el nino AGW yada yada yada) and a very cold one. 2010 also shows this very warm / very cold pattern. Those with access to the temperature records may be able to tell me – is this normal? If so, is it cyclical?
Thanks
That pattern looks like a plume. I would suggest the possibility that all the cars wrecked by the japan tsunami have released a record quantity of refrigerant into the atmosphere, leading to ozone loss.
Bowen says on April 6, 2011 at 11:34 am
Well, if you look at the date under each comment you will see that it is a URL. Just copy it and then do something like <a href=”the-copied-URL”>The date and time</a> and you are done.
What a coincidence…
According to the following link, the huge Feb 14, ’11 solar flare glanced off the northern pole.
http://www.deseretnews.com/article/700111303/Particles-from-powerful-solar-flare-hit-Earth.html
I’ve read a number of scientific articles that say some of the sun’s particles can destroy ozone and that the magnetic poles channel these particles towards the south and/or north pole.
But what am I thinking, we should trust those ozone scientists who worked on that issue:
“I have seen this happen before, of course. We should have been warned by the CFC/ozone affair because the corruption of science in that was so bad that something like 80% of the measurements being made during that time were either faked, or incompetently done.”
James Lovelock, one of the scientists who worked on the ozone issue.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2010/mar/29/james-lovelock/print
beng says:
April 6, 2011 at 7:11 am “yet high ozone levels are usually present along the “rim” of the polar vortices all winter when there is almost negligible UV exposure. How is it produced & how does it persist there? Transport from lower latitudes doesn’t make much sense as the ozone levels are higher at the rim than anywhere equatorward where the ozone would supposedly be produced.”
Ozone results from the chance aggregation of oxygen atoms, split by short wave energy from the sun. This occurs in the mid to upper stratosphere. Gases migrate in all directions. As ozone descends it runs into water vapour.
In the industrial production of ozone the air is cooled to minus 80°C so as to de-humidify it. Ozone is highly soluble in water. At the poles the air is drier than anywhere else so ozone is best conserved there and it persists in winter even though there is no radiation of any sort to split oxygen molecules. The winter pole is dark.
To understand the variation in ozone in the winter stratosphere you must come to grips with the night jet that brings erosive compounds of nitrogen from the mesosphere. The activity of night jet varies directly with surface atmsopheric pressure. A good measure of polar pressure is the Arctic and the Antarctic Oscillation indexes.
It is well known that the Arctic oscillation Index relates strongly to the direction of the wind in mid latitudes. Low AO brings cold polar air. High AO (low polar pressure) allows the westerlies to sweep north. The AO varies between high and low on a 30 year time scale.
As ‘Just the facts’ suggests Arctic pressure is driven by change in the Antarctic where the coupling of the stratosphere with the troposphere is perennial rather than occasional, in winters where surface pressure is high, as is the case in the Arctic.
Could this be a sign of a magnetic reversal? Does anyone know for sure what happens to ozone during these events?
I could have swore I saw them address this issue on “Magnetic Storm” on PBS’s NOVA but it has been awhile since I watched that episode.