Ozone hole was first discovered by which satellite

Ozone is composed of three oxygen atoms and makes up very little of our atmosphere, but it has a huge impact on our planet. The blanket-like layer stretching over the globe absorbs the most harmful ultraviolet (UV) radiation from the sun, shielding Earth's life. Ozone forms in the stratosphere, around 9 to 18 miles (14.5 to 29 kilometers) above Earth's surface. It forms when UV radiation splits regular oxygen molecules, which are made of two oxygen atoms (O2); the two free-floating oxygen atoms then each bond with an oxygen molecule, forming a molecule made of three oxygen atoms. Scientists discovered the thinning ozone layer over Antarctica in the early 1980s. Although ozone is created and destroyed naturally in the stratosphere, human-driven pollution destroys ozone faster than it can form. In particular, industries that use chlorine or bromine, like refrigeration and air conditioning, destroy ozone at alarmingly high rates. In the stratosphere, chlorine molecules react with ozone to create one chlorine monoxide molecule (composed of a chlorine atom and an oxygen atom) and one O2 molecule. Then the chlorine monoxide molecule breaks down, freeing that chlorine atom to react with more ozone. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, one atom of chlorine can destroy Substances like chlorofluorocarbons, used in refrigeration and air conditioning, stay in the atmosphere for a long time — some for longer than six months — meaning the chlorine and other chemicals from t...

This story originally appeared on Yale Environment 360 and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. There is a paradox at the heart of our changing climate. While the blanket of air close to the Earth’s surface is warming, most of the atmosphere above is becoming dramatically colder. The same gases that are warming the bottom few miles of air are cooling the much greater expanses above that stretch to the edge of space. This paradox has long been predicted by climate modelers, but it has only recently been quantified in detail by satellite sensors. The new findings are providing a definitive confirmation on one important issue, but at the same time they are raising other questions. The good news for climate scientists is that the data on cooling aloft confirm the accuracy of models that identify surface warming as human-made. A PNAS by veteran climate modeler Ben Santer of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution found that it increased the strength of the “signal” of the human fingerprint of climate change fivefold, by reducing the interference “noise” from background natural variability. Santer says the finding is “incontrovertible.” But the new discoveries about the scale of cooling aloft are leaving atmospheric physicists with new worries—about the safety of orbiting satellites, about the fate of the ozone layer, and about the potential of these rapid changes to visit sudden and unanticipated turmoil on our weather below. The Earth’s atmosphere has a number of layers...

En español: Dedicated at the University of California, Irvine on April 18, 2017. The language is dry and academic, as is appropriate for the abstract of a scientific paper in the prestigious journal Nature. The research described in the short paper, however, fell like a scientific bombshell, one whose repercussions would be felt around the world. It set off fierce debates, led to a global environmental treaty restricting the use of a broad class of chemicals, and changed the way humans viewed their impact on Earth’s environment. It also led to F. Sherwood Rowland (1927-2012) and Mario J. Molina (*1943) sharing the 1995 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Paul J. Crutzen of the Max Plank Institute for Chemistry, Mainz, another pioneer in stratospheric ozone research. Rowland, a professor of chemistry at the University of California, Irvine, and Molina, a postdoctoral fellow in Rowland’s laboratory, had shown that chlorofluorocarbons—CFCs—could destroy ozone, a molecule made up of three oxygen atoms, O 3, in Earth’s stratosphere. That stratospheric ozone absorbs ultraviolet radiation that otherwise would reach the surface of Earth. At the time, CFCs were in wide use in refrigeration, air conditioning and aerosol spray cans. The compounds are inert and essentially nontoxic, characteristics that made them well-suited for these applications. These same characteristics, however, also made them a danger to life on Earth. Landmark Lesson Plan: Chlorofluorocarbons and Ozone Depletion NAS...

Total ozone measured by the OMPS Nadir Mapper on February 17, 2023. Credit: NASA/NOAA/JPSS On February 9, 2023, an ozone-measuring instrument on the recently launched NOAA-21 satellite opened its doors and, over the course of a week, gathered data for its first global image. The Ozone Mapping and Profiler Suite (OMPS) consists of three sensors that monitor Earth's ozone layer and track its recovery. The map above, created using OMPS data, shows total OMPS was originally designed to measure ozone high in the atmosphere; this ozone layer protects humans and other life on Earth from the harmful effects of ultraviolet radiation. This is not to be confused with ground-level ozone, a harmful air pollutant and the main ingredient in smog. "We want to be able to measure ozone changes to 1% or better over a 10-year timescale," said Glen Jaross, NASA's OMPS instrument scientist for the Joint Polar Satellite System. In the decade since the first OMPS was launched on the Suomi-NPP satellite, the instrument's capabilities have expanded to include observations of aerosols, such as smoke from wildfires and sulfur dioxide and ash from volcanoes. For example, on February 17, 2023, OMPS detected NASA began measuring ozone from space in 1979, not long before scientists discovered that harmful chemicals called chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, could cause dangerous depletion of atmospheric ozone. By the mid-1980s, scientists discovered a "hole" in the ozone layer of the stratosphere over Antarcti...