Science News
Repaired ozone hole will warm Antarctic
The ozone hole helps shield the interior of the Antarctic from global warming's effects—but once it is healed, the continent could catch up quickly with the warming trends of the rest of the planet.
As the ozone hole becomes smaller over the Antarctic, the southernmost continent will warm, according to new modeling results. Researchers predict that weather and climate patterns will return to the seasonal shifts—particularly in spring and summer—that the Southern Hemisphere experienced before the ozone hole developed several decades ago.
Researchers started their models in the 1970s, when the Antarctic first lost about 10% of its stratospheric ozone because of manufactured chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). As CFC production has dropped since the 1987 Montreal Protocol (PDF Size: 142 KB), NASA researchers have projected that the ozone hole will be healed by about 2060.
The new modeling results, published April 26 in Geophysical Research Letters (DOI 10.1029/2008GL033317), show that as the ozone hole shrinks, the atmosphere several kilometers above the Antarctic will begin to warm. The models indicate that warming about 10 kilometers above the earth's surface could raise the temperature by as much as 9 °C by 2100. That will set off a chain reaction, shifting the wind patterns that are part of what is known as the Southern Hemisphere Annular Mode (SAM). Those southerlies have kept warm air away from the center of the continent, which has remained surprisingly cool despite warming global temperatures. The 30-year period of increasing ozone loss will take about 90 years to reverse.
As the ozone over the Antarctic returns to pre-CFC conditions, so will the weather patterns, the researchers say, but with a slight twist. Depending on future emission rates, greenhouse gases could keep the SAM pattern in the same configuration as today, despite the closing of the ozone hole.
"If human activities cause more rapid increases in greenhouse gases, or if we continue to produce these gases for a longer period of time, then the positive SAM may dominate year-round and dwarf any climatic effects caused by ozone recovery," said lead author Judith Perlwitz of the University of Colorado at Boulder and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, in a press release.
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