Jury still out on whether the Arctic ozone hole is an exception
Last winter, an unprecedented ozone hole appeared above the Arctic, five times the size of Germany. For ETH-Zurich professor Thomas Peter, the recently published study comes as no surprise. But it does raise many questions.
Mr Peter, a year ago we were over the moon that
the Montreal Protocol adopted in 1987 seems to be having an impact: a study in
your group showed that on average the ozone is increasing again globally – and
especially in the moderate northern latitudes. Now, however, an unprecedented
ozone hole has been located above the Arctic. What happened?
There
had been severe ozone losses over the Arctic before but never what one would call
an ozone hole. This turn of events is linked to changing temperature structures
in the atmosphere. Every winter in the Antarctic, which is much colder, there
are so-called polar stratospheric clouds, upon which the chlorine humans have
released into the atmosphere is transferred in an aggressive form, which then
destroys the ozone. This can also happen in the Arctic if the stratosphere
cools down sufficiently in the wintertime. But the stratosphere doesn’t usually
get that cold in the Arctic. Whereas the air masses are self-contained above
the isolated Antarctic continent, the Arctic air flows over mountain ranges and
is affected by land and sea differences. The resulting air flow disturbances move
upwards into the stratosphere, which generally prevents the polar vortex in the
north from becoming as stable and cold as in the south. The article in Nature
now shows that this north-south difference has become smaller and the situation
in the Arctic last winter suddenly became very Antarctic-like.
So an unusually cold stratosphere is to blame. And
yet Greenland’s icecap and the Arctic ice are melting dramatically. How does
that add up?
Humans
are releasing more and more greenhouse gases – especially CO2 – into
the atmosphere that warm the troposphere and cause the ice sheets to melt.
However, the same greenhouse gases have a cooling effect on the stratosphere,
which leads to more stratospheric clouds upon which chlorine is activated,
which in turn ultimately destroys more ozone. So we people are doubly responsible
– by emitting greenhouses and releasing chlorine into the atmosphere in the
form of CFCs.
So, ultimately, that means the evidence of
ozone regeneration that was discovered only a year ago in the mid-latitudes can
be cancelled out again by climate warming.
Fortunately, it’s not quite that bad. Of course, such
severe destruction of the ozone also has an impact on the mid-latitudes if the
air masses with greatly reduced ozone values are carried southwards at the end
of the winter. We’re affected one way or another as, through the occurrence of
reduced Arctic ozone, the ozone layer has also become somewhat thinner above
us. However, if the next few winters return to normal and are not as cold in
the stratosphere, the ozone layer will continue to recover as we predicted a
year ago. The authors of the new study write that we can’t say when and whether
a situation like this will crop up again.
What if greenhouse-gas emissions continue to
increase?
If
humans don’t reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, these temperature changes in the
stratosphere will also persist. This means the stratosphere could also cool
down further in the North Pole region. Then the Montreal Protocol will have worked
well because it has put a stop to the emission of any more of the gases that
damage the ozone. Nonetheless, we would have a problem with regard to the ozone
layer in the high latitudes because we keep pumping CO2 into the
atmosphere instead of implementing the Kyoto Protocol and other climate goals.
Did the study come as a surprise to you?
No. The turn
of events became apparent last winter and was discussed among scientists. But
one figure in the study is bewildering: the graph illustrates the ozone depletion
over the Arctic last winter and practically traces the course and ozone depletion
in the Antarctic. If you interpret the figure, the mechanism in the Arctic
appears to have proceeded exactly like in the Antarctic.
What would it mean if this scenario were to recur
every winter?
If the
natural variability in the Arctic stratosphere were to become as weak as in the
Antarctic, we’d have a winter with a hole in the ozone above the Arctic every
year. We didn’t consider this case in our article on the Montreal Protocol.
That would mean we’d have to reconsider the books since the large air mass in
which the ozone is destroyed in the winter would be imported to northern
midlatitudes in the summer. But like I said, such an extreme scenario isn’t
compatible with our current knowledge.
Doesn’t that mean we would have to reckon with
new requirements for the regeneration of the ozone layer and expect even more
extensive changes in the climate conditions?
Scientists have been concerned with this question
for a long time. They examine the impact stratospheric changes have on the troposphere
underneath. We know from the Antarctic that the hole in the ozone has changed
the weather near the ground. Winds have become stronger and temperatures are
changing, which may have contributed to the recent large-scale ice losses. There
could also be similar changes in the north. But this interplay
between chemistry and the climate remains insufficiently described. This
requires complex models. We are presently unable to predict the possible
consequences, so I’ll have to leave the question unanswered. While the chances
are good that the next few winters will be considerably milder in the Arctic
stratosphere, as the researchers also stress in the paper we don’t know whether
this kind of occurrence could become more frequent.
But that also means we still have a lot of
unknowns in our climate models.
Precisely.
The dynamic models predict that the climate changes are more likely to disrupt
the Arctic stratospheric vortex and not allow the stratosphere to cool down
quite so much, which begs the question as to whether this new study is at all
compatible with our models: is that just “weather”? A remarkably cold
stratospheric winter, just as there was a remarkably hot tropospheric summer in
2003?
But again that just goes to show we’re not
fully in the picture when it comes to the processes of climate change…
… that’s right; we’re not. We know that the greenhouse gases cooled the
global stratosphere down in the mid-latitudes. About thirteen years ago, I
concluded in a publication that if this cooling occurs in the polar regions,
we’ll also have an ozone hole in the Arctic. After the models suggested that
the stratosphere tends to be disturbed, thus preventing cooling, however, I
didn’t pursue it any further. And now we have this new paper. For me, the
jury’s still out on whether the Arctic ozone hole is just an exception or whether
the alarm bells should be ringing due to the major consistencies with what
happened in the Antarctic.
Hole in the ozone
Ozone holes have been appearing in the Antarctic every year from winter to spring since the 1980s. Last winter, however, an ozone hole was observed above the Arctic for the first time. The results of a subsequent study have just been published in the journal Nature. The ozone layer at an altitude of fifteen to forty kilometres, in the stratosphere, protects life on the earth against harmful UV radiation. Chlorofluorocarbons damage the ozone layer and enable more UV radiation to reach the earth, which can cause skin cancer. In 1985 an ozone hole over the South Pole region was detected for the first time. The Montreal Protocol, which was ratified in 1987 and came into force two years later, obligates the signatory states to curb the use of CFCs, such as in sprays, and ultimately dispense with them altogether. It has been repeatedly been refined in recent years on the strength of new findings and meanwhile also contains CFC substitutes and brominated halons, such as those used in fire extinguishers.
Further reading
Manney GL et al.: Unprecedented Arctic ozone loss in 2011, Nature (2011), published online 2 October 2011, DOI: 10.1038/nature10556
READER COMMENTS