Discovering the ozone hole

The article by Anne Douglass, Paul Newman, and Susan Solomon, “The Antarctic ozone hole: An update” (Physics Today, July 2014, page 42 ), made for an interesting read. I would like to relate an experience from the early days of satellite ozone retrievals. My first job out of graduate school in 1977 was with a small contractor for NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. I was assigned to the ozone processing team and worked as a scientific programmer and note taker. With the best science and algorithms available, we were reprocessing the 1970–71 data from the NIMBUS 4’s backscatter UV experiment. In the winter of 1978, I was tasked with plotting the geographical distributions of where the retrieval algorithm failed. As I recall, there were eight failure modes, one of which was climatologically unreasonable ozone levels below a lower limit of, I believe, 200 Dobson units. The plot showed that the failure was predominantly over the Antarctic. When I displayed the plots at the next weekly team meeting, my presentation came to a halt while the senior scientists wondered what they all meant. I sat down and listened as they talked back and forth for the better part of an hour. Eventually, I finished my presentation with the matter unresolved.

I like to say that I discovered the ozone hole. Of course, it was not the actual ozone hole but an early indicator that ozone was being destroyed in the south polar vortex.