Ozone concentrations over the Arctic reached a record-high monthly average in March 2024.
Ozone concentrations over the Arctic reached a record-high monthly average in March 2024. Due to large-scale weather systems that disturbed the upper atmosphere throughout the 2023-2024 winter, more ozone moved into and persisted in the stratosphere over the Arctic than at any other time in the satellite record.
A team of NASA and University of Leeds scientists reported their findings in a September 2024 paper in Geophysical Research Letters. “Given the absence of high Arctic ozone since the 1970s,” the authors wrote, “the March 2024 record high should be considered a positive harbinger of the future Arctic ozone layer.”
Between December 2023 and March 2024, a series of planetary-scale waves propagated upward through the atmosphere and slowed the stratospheric jet stream that circulates around the Arctic. When that happens, air from the mid-latitudes converges on the pole, sending ozone into the Arctic stratosphere. In addition to the influx of ozone, there was very little of the typical ozone depletion by substances such as chlorine, said Paul Newman, chief scientist for Earth sciences at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and lead author of the study. “It was a very dynamical, active winter in the northern hemisphere,” he said.
Read more at: NASA Earth Observatory
Photo Credit: Michala Garrison
