Monday, March 29, 2010

What Ozone Hole?


As a result of now being able to make movies from gridded data, I've been going through the ISCCP data that comes with the Climate Scientist Starter Kit. A movie of the ozone data is provided above.

What surprised me was the amount of ozone over Antarctica was equal to or greater than the amount of ozone over nearly the entire rest of the world. Only the Arctic consistently had more ozone (and it has quite a bit of ozone). This was true from the beginning of the movie (July, 1983) to the end (June, 2008).

Which makes me wonder why we've never heard of of an ozone hole over Africa, or South America, or India, all of which always have less ozone than Antarctica.

Now, I'm hardly an ozone expert. So if anyone out there would like to enlighten me on why this all makes sense, please feel free to do so. Because right now I'm wondering if the Ozone Hole is as big a hoax as Global Warming. Tips on why the Arctic has so much ozone are also welcome.

P.S.
If you watch the video all the way through, you get to see what happens when a satellite sensor goes batty.

1 comment:

  1. Questions:
    1. Which is ozone data in CSSK? I find CO2 & Water vapor. No O3.
    2. What is purpose of 'normalizing' data in CSSK?
    3. In movie, color table confusing - what color is low, what color is high? What color is 'no data'?
    4. Does this data seperate stratospheric & tropospheric ozone? Stratospheric shields from UV. Tropospheric sources are industry & fires which would be consistent with higher amounts over N. hemisphere & Africa.
    5. Mercator projection can significantly distort perception of amount of ozone. Use equal-area projection like Hammer or Aitoff.

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