Twenty Years of Ozone Decline

Abstract

Solar ultraviolet radiation creates an ozone layer in the atmosphere which in turn completely absorbs the most energetic fraction of this radiation. This process both warms the air, creating the stratosphere between 15 and 50 km altitude, and protects the biological activities at the Earth's surface from this damaging radiation. In the last half-century, the chemical mechanisms operating within the ozone layer have been shown to include very efficient catalytic chain reactions involving the chemical species HO, HO(2), NO, NO(2), Cl and ClO. The NO(x) and ClO(x) chains involve emission of stable molecules in very low concentration at the Earth's surface (N(2)O, CCl(2)F(2), CCl(3)F, etc.), which wander in the atmosphere for as long as a century before absorbing ultraviolet radiation and decomposing to create NO and Cl in the middle of the stratospheric ozone layer. The growing emissions of synthetic chlorofluorocarbon molecules cause a significant diminution in the ozone content of the stratosphere, resulting in more solar ultraviolet-B radiation (290-320 nm wavelength) reaching the surface. This ozone loss occurs in the temperate zone latitudes in all seasons and has been drastic since the early 1980s, especially in the south polar springtime-the 'Antarctic ozone hole'. The chemical reactions causing this ozone depletion are primarily based on atomic Cl and ClO, which is the product of its reaction with ozone. The further manufacture of chlorofluorocarbons has been banned by the 1992 revisions of the 1987 Montreal Protocol of the United Nations. Atmospheric measurements have confirmed that the Protocol has been very successful in reducing further emissions of these molecules. Restoration of the stratosphere to the ozone conditions of the 1950s will occur slowly over the rest of the twenty-first century because of the long lifespan of the precursor molecules.