• DOI:10.1038/nature10556
• Corpus ID: 4412386

Unprecedented Arctic ozone loss in 2011

@article{Manney2011UnprecedentedAO,
  title={Unprecedented Arctic ozone loss in 2011},
  author={Gloria L. Manney and Michelle L. Santee and Markus Rex and Nathaniel J. Livesey and Michael C. Pitts and Pepijn Veefkind and Eric R. Nash and Ingo Wohltmann and Ralph Lehmann and Lucien Froidevaux and Lamont R. Poole and Mark R. Schoeberl and David P. Haffner and Jonathan Davies and Valery Dorokhov and Hartwig Gernandt and Bryan Johnson and Rigel Kivi and Esko Kyr{\"o} and Niels Larsen and Pieternel F. Levelt and Alexander Makshtas and C. Thomas McElroy and Hideaki Nakajima and Ma Concepcion Parrondo and David W. Tarasick and P. Gathen and Kaley A. Walker and Nikita S. Zinoviev},
  journal={Nature},
  year={2011},
  volume={478},
  pages={469-475}
}

• G. Manney, M. Santee, +26 authors Nikita S. Zinoviev
• Published 27 October 2011
• Environmental Science, Medicine
• Nature

Chemical ozone destruction occurs over both polar regions in local winter–spring. In the Antarctic, essentially complete removal of lower-stratospheric ozone currently results in an ozone hole every year, whereas in the Arctic, ozone loss is highly variable and has until now been much more limited. Here we demonstrate that chemical ozone destruction over the Arctic in early 2011 was—for the first time in the observational record—comparable to that in the Antarctic ozone hole. Unusually long-lasting cold conditions in the Arctic lower stratosphere led to persistent enhancement in ozone-destroying forms of chlorine and to unprecedented ozone loss, which exceeded 80 per cent over 18–20 kilometres altitude. Our results show that Arctic ozone holes are possible even with temperatures much milder than those in the Antarctic. We cannot at present predict when such severe Arctic ozone depletion may be matched or exceeded.