Climate Change May Triple Arctic Ozone Loss - Nature

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"The thinning of the ozone layer over the Arctic could be much worse than we thought, because of a side-effect of global warming.

If the upper reaches of the Arctic atmosphere get colder - a predicted consequence of climate change - then the rate of ozone depletion could be three times greater than currently forecast, according to Markus Rex of the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Potsdam, Germany, and his co-workers.

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Rex and his colleagues studied climate conditions in the Arctic over the past ten winters to calculate how ozone destruction depends on the weather. They found a surprisingly strong relationship between ozone loss and the amount of polar stratospheric clouds, they report in Geophysical Research Letters1.

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Colder air in the stratosphere is thought to promote the formation of these clouds and the destruction of ozone. But it has proven difficult to appreciate the scale of the problem. On average the Arctic stratosphere has cooled barely perceptibly over the past few years, but Rex and colleagues say the winter-time conditions are getting more conducive to ozone destruction. The amount of stratospheric cloud has been climbing steadily since at least the late 1960s, they say. If Rex's findings and models prove correct, then all our predictions about future ozone depletion are under-estimates, says Shindell."

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http://www.nature.com/nsu/040301/040301-5.html