Total ozone depletion over Greece as deduced from satellite observations

Abstract

The reprocessed (version 7) daily total ozone observations made by the Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer (TOMS) on the Nimbus-7 satellite over Athens (37.6 N, 23.4 E) for the period from November 1978 until April 1993 have been used to investigate total ozone depletion. To estimate the trends in total ozone content a linear fitting to the data has been applied, given that the other components like the quasi-biennial oscillation, the El Nino/Southern Oscillation and the solar cycle have a very small contribution to the total ozone depletion effects over that geographical region. The total ozone depletion over the 15-year period was derived from version 7 shows a strong seasonal variation from more than 6% in winter and early spring to about 1.5% in summer. The total ozone depletion over Greece is found to be about 1% (per decade) less using version 7 than using version 6.