The Reversed Changes in Southern Hemisphere Winds

The Reversed Changes in Southern Hemisphere Winds


There have been changes in the atmospheric circulation in the Southern Hemisphere caused by the same chemicals that destroy the ozone layer that protects the Earth.
A new study recently published in the Naturejournal reports that there has been a break in such changes, which could even reverse, thanks to the Montreal Protocol, an international treaty that successfully eradicated the use of ozone-depleting chemicals.
Banerjee also works in NOAA’s Chemical Sciences Division. This study was started while she was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Columbia University.
The ozone hole was first discovered in 1985 and has been forming in the atmosphere high over Antarctica every spring. Due to ozone depletion, the air cools down, which strengthens the winds of the polar vortex and has an impact on the winds all the way down to the lowest layer of Earth’s atmosphere. Eventually, as a result of ozone depletion, the dry regions at the edge of the tropics and the midlatitude jet stream have been shifted toward the South Pole.
As per earlier studies, these circulation trends are associated with changes in the weather in the Southern Hemisphere, specifically rainfall over East Africa, South America, and Australia, as well as with variations in ocean currents and salinity

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

You may soon be able to ride to the edge of space from Alaska in a Balloon

Image
You may soon be able to ride to the edge of space from Alaska in a Balloon Florida-based startup firm Space Perspective plans to use the Pacific Spaceport Complex in Kodiak to serve as one of the launch sites for the vehicle, called the Spaceship Neptune A company wants to use an advanced balloon to fly customers from Earth’s surface in Alaska to the highest reaches of the planet’s atmosphere. Florida-based startup firm Space Perspective plans to use the Pacific Spaceport Complex in Kodiak to serve as one of the launch sites for the vehicle, called the Spaceship Neptune,  The Anchorage Daily News  reported on Sunday. The balloon rides will be manned by a flight crew taking eight passengers in a pressurized capsule suspended beneath a hydrogen balloon the size of a football stadium. Each passenger could pay an estimated $125,000 for a six-hour journey. Mark Lester, CEO of Alaska Aerospace Corp., said the high-altitude rides will be available from Kodiak in a few years and will ...
Read more

Committee recommends review of planetary protection policies

Image
Committee recommends review of planetary protection policies WASHINGTON — The NASA Advisory Council has recommended that NASA review its existing planetary protection guidelines to balance the needs of science and exploration, an effort that could set the stage for a similar revision at the international level. The council, during a two-day meeting at NASA Headquarters Dec. 10–11, adopted a recommendation calling on NASA to establish an interdisciplinary committee of experts to review the agency’s current requirements for preventing contamination of other worlds by NASA spacecraft as well as any contamination of the Earth by materials brought back from those worlds. “NASA should establish a multidisciplinary task force of experts from industry, the scientific community, and relevant government agencies, to develop U.S. policies that properly balance the legitimate need to protect against the harmful contamination of the Earth or other celestial bodies with the scientific, social, and e...
Read more

Surprise! There's more water on Jupiter than anyone thought

Surprise! There's more water on Jupiter than anyone thought Jupiter  appears to have more water than anyone expected. Newly released data from  NASA's Juno probe shows that water may make up about 0.25% of the molecules in the atmosphere over Jupiter's equator. While that doesn't sound like much, the calculation is based on a prevalence of water's components, hydrogen and oxygen, three times more than at the sun. The new measurements Juno obtained are much higher than a previous mission suggested. The surprise result has scientists delving deep again into results from  NASA's Galileo mission to Jupiter , which obtained drier results in 1995 when engineers deliberately threw the spacecraft into Jupiter's atmosphere. (Galileo was low on fuel and NASA didn't want to take the chance, even if it was a slight one, of the spacecraft accidentally crashing on a potentially habitable icy moon.) Reconciling the results from Galileo and Juno is key for sc...
Read more