Warm air helped make 2017 ozone hole smallest since 1988

Measurements from satellites this year showed the hole in Earth’s ozone layer that forms over Antarctica each September was the smallest observed since 1988, scientists from NASA and NOAA announced today.

Possible new threat to Earth’s ozone layer

The Montreal Protocol has been hailed for controlling chlorine-based chemicals that created a vast hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica. But new research by British and American scientists suggest a chemical not controlled by the international treaty poses a potential risk to the Earth’s protective ozone layer.

Fifty years ago, a historic balloon launch that changed the way we see the ozone layer

What started out as a modest research project driven by scientific curiosity provided the agency that would later become NOAA with some of the first insights into how ozone was distributed in the atmosphere.

Watch a weather balloon explode 100,000 feet high in the atmosphere

Patrick Cullis of the GMD Ozone and Water Vapor Group, created a video of a weather balloon bursting, posted at Washington Post.

Antarctic ozone hole about average in 2016

The hole in the Earth’s ozone layer that forms over Antarctica each September grew to about 8.9 million square miles in 2016 before starting to recover, according to scientists from NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) who monitor the annual phenomenon.

4 ways the ozone hole is linked to climate, and 1 way it isn’t

To mark the peak of ozone hole season, we’re highlighting four ways that climate and the ozone hole are related—and one important way they aren’t.

Pacific Oxidants, Sulfur, Ice, Dehydration, and cONvection (POSIDON) Experiment

The NASA Pacific Oxidants, Sulfur, Ice, Dehydration, and cONvection (POSIDON) Experiment is a focused airborne science mission to study the ozone distribution, sulfur chemistry, very short-lived ozone depleting species (VSLS), cloud microphysics, and dehydration in the tropical upper troposphere and lower stratosphere over the western Pacific.

NOAA “reels in” data on Utah’s winter ozone problem

A deep sea fishing rod is probably not the first tool that comes to mind when thinking about how to study air pollution in a remote inland desert, but it’s the heart of a new NOAA system that has given scientists a minute-by-minute look at how quickly the sun can convert oil and gas facility emissions to harmful ground-level ozone.

Robert (Bob) D. Evans of ESRL Global Monitoring Division receives the prestigious IO3C Farman Award Nomination

Robert (Bob) D. Evans of ESRL Global Monitoring Division receives the prestigious IO3C Farman Award Nomination For Sustaining a Long-term Inter-calibrated World-wide Dobson Total Ozone Observing Network. The "Joseph C. Farman Award" is granted to one or more outstanding scientists who have created and used high-quality, long-term time series of atmospheric measurements related to the study of atmospheric ozone and/or surface ultraviolet radiation.

Atmospheric Tomography Mission (ATom)

The Atmospheric Tomography Mission (ATom) is a NASA-funded multi-agency effort using the NASA DC-8 research aircraft to systematically sample trace gases and aerosols from sea level to the stratosphere on 10 pole-to-pole flights covering the Atlantic and Pacific oceans over the next 3 years. ATom will study the impact of human-produced air pollution on greenhouse gases and on chemically reactive gases in the atmosphere with a focus on ozone, methane, and black carbon, as well as atmospheric particulate matter.

Bryan Johnson, Monitoring ozone at the ends of the Earth

Bryan Johnson is an atmospheric scientist at NOAA's Earth System Research Laboratory who specializes in ozone research. He has a bachelor's degree in chemical engineering from Montana State University, but after two years working in the oil industry he decided to shift gears. He went on to graduate school and earned a master's in meteorology from the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology and a Ph.D. in atmospheric sciences from the University of Arizona. His current research at ESRL in Boulder, Colo., focuses on monitoring atmospheric ozone and estimating rates of ozone depletion across the globe. And he gets to use really big balloons to do it.