Thirty years after NASA and NOAA launched a groundbreaking airborne campaign to study the Antarctic ozone hole, the two federal science agencies have once again joined forces over the world’s highest, driest and coldest continent to sniff out the secrets of the atmosphere.
On Oct. 14, NASA’s heavily instrumented DC-8 flew over Antarctica as part of the Atmospheric Tomography Mission or ATom, an unprecedented effort to sample the remote atmosphere to understand the distribution of man-made pollutants and short-lived greenhouse gases.
Thirty years after NASA and NOAA launched a groundbreaking airborne campaign to study the Antarctic ozone hole, the two federal science agencies have once again joined forces over the world’s highest, driest and coldest continent to sniff out the secrets of the atmosphere.
On Oct. 14, NASA’s heavily instrumented DC-8 flew over Antarctica as part of the Atmospheric Tomography Mission or ATom, an unprecedented effort to sample the remote atmosphere to understand the distribution of man-made pollutants and short-lived greenhouse gases.
“The atmospheric measurements that ATom takes are unavailable by any other means,” said NOAA scientist Tom Ryerson. “ATom is designed to tell us the current state of 80 percent of Earth’s atmosphere. It will give us an important and unique reality check on the computer models we use to predict the future.”
In 1987, it was another planetary puzzle that brought NASA and NOAA together. The ozone hole had just been discovered and the joint mission to Antarctica was designed to help resolve questions about which of several competing theories were responsible for the seasonal depletion of stratospheric ozone.
Continue reading at NOAA.
Photo via NOAA.
