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South Polar ozone hole makes big comeback

30 August 2005

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This forecast map of assimilated total ozone (in Dobson Units) for 9 September 2005 is made at the Royal Dutch Meteorological Institute by combining wind data from the European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) with direct ozone observations from the SCIAMACHY atmospheric instrument aboard ESA's Envisat. An operational atmospheric ozone forecasting service is available via the PROMOTE (PROtocol MOniToring for the GMES Service Element) consortium, part of the GMES Services Element.

Credits: KNMI/ESA

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This graph compares this year's new-born ozone hole - represented by dots - with those of previous years, in terms of area, in millions of square kilometres on the vertical axis and time duration, on the horizontal axis. The hole is defined as a thickness of ozone that is less than 200 Dobson Units (DUs). The information on this chart comes from ten years of ESA satellite observations, first from the Global Ozone Monitoring Experiment (GOME) instrument on ERS-2, and now from its successor, Scanning Imaging Absorption Spectrometer for Atmospheric Chartography (SCIAMACHY), on Envisat.

Credits: KNMI/ESA

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ESA's ten-instrument Envisat environmental satellite has been observing the Earth for more than three years. Picture by EADS Astrium.

Credits: EADS Astrium