Stratospheric ozone during the arctic winter: Brewer measurements in Ny-Ålesund

Abstract

To restrict the human impact on the environment, many preventive actions have been adopted in recent decades e.g. the Vienna Convention (1985) and the Montreal Protocol (1987). So monitoring of the atmosphere assumes the important purpose to check the effectiveness of mitigation strategies. The studies on stratospheric ozone are relevant because of its filtering action for UV and its high sensitivity to CFC. During the past 20 years the trend of ozone depletion has been strongly negative, particularly in Polar Regions. Recently weak signals indicate that a recovery has started, even if to disguise anthropogenic impact from natural trend is difficult. So studies on stratospheric ozone during the polar night are important to understand the chemistry involved. This paper shows the results of a first polar winter campaign (September 2007 to March 2008) by Brewer spectrophotometer in Ny-Alesund, Norway, using solar UV reflected by the Moon. TOMS, MLS-AURA and SCIAMACHY data are also shown.

Acknowledgements

This work is under the PNRA Italian Antarctic Program and the CNR Arctic Project, which funded the research. The authors are grateful to NILU and NP personnel in Ny-Ålesund since, without their collaboration in logistics and in management of scientific instruments, the activities would not have been carried out. The SCHIAMACHY satellite data are provided through the PROMOTE ozone service (www.gse-promote.org) project, and we acknowledge the European Space Agency for making these data available through this project.