Tag: Antarctica

IIT Kharagpur unveiled the increasing ozone pollution in Antarctica

IIT Kharagpur researchers revealed significant increase of ozone pollution in the Antarctic troposphere for the past 25 years, which is a concern as the region is far from the industries and continental emission sources.

A recent scientific study analysed the significant increase of Surface Ozone and Tropospheric Ozone in Antarctica for the past 25 years. The research findings were supported by surface-based and ozonesonde measurements in Antarctica.

“The increasing trend in ozone pollution across Antarctica would have a profound impact on the future climate of one of the most climate-sensitive regions on the Earth, as tropospheric ozone has warming feedback to the Earth’s climate, and that can accelerate melting of sea-ice, changes in water masses, and damages to the ecosystem”, said Prof Jayanarayanan Kuttippurath, the lead researcher and Assistant Professor of Centre for Oceans, Rivers, Atmosphere, and Land sciences at IIT Kharagpur.

 The research findings are published in Environmental Science and Technology Journal of the American Chemical Society (https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.est.0c08491) on June 16, 2021. In this regards, American Chemical Society made the press release on the same date (https://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/pressroom/presspacs/2021/acs-presspac-june-16-2021/ozone-pollution-has-increased-in-antartica.html).

The increasing pollution in a remote region with no industries, no significant population, very limited anthropogenic activities and about 6500 km away from the equator, is a serious concern and suggests substantial anthropogenic pollution across the latitudes.  Dominant sources of ozone are both natural and from human-related sources. The researchers compiled the ozone data measured between 1992 and 2018 at ground level and through the atmosphere, from the lower atmosphere into the ozone layer, at eight stations across Antarctica.

“Making measurements and monitoring the environment at remote locations such as Antarctica is very important because of its remoteness and constant clean air there making it easier to detect even slight changes related to global scale, and thus can expose first signals of global change”, added Prof Virendra Kumar Tewari, the IIT Kharagpur Director.

 

“The increasing trend in ozone pollution is significant even after accounting for the natural variability, and we find substantial amounts of ozone pollution is being transported from neighbouring regions,” said Mr. Pankaj Kumar, the research scholar from the Centre of Oceans, Rivers, Atmosphere and Land Science of IIT Kharagpur as well as the another lead author of the paper.

The authors acknowledged the Department of Science and Technology (DST), Ministry of Education (MoE), and Ministry of Earth Science (MoES) for facilitating the study. They also thanked Dr M Ravichandran, the Director of National Centre for Ocean and Polar Research Goa, India for his encouragement and support for this study.

Media Contact: Prof Jayanarayanan Kuttippurath, Assistant Professor

Email: jayan@coral.iitkgp.ac.in, Ph. no.: +91-9475472847

Contact: Paramita Dey, Junior Assistant

Email: media@iitkgp.ac.in, Ph. No.: +91-3222-282004

 

The Healing Ozone

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While the world is debating on climate change and global warming, researchers at IIT Kharagpur have given the environmental evangelists a reason to rejoice. A research team from the Center of Oceans, Rivers, Atmosphere and Land Science (CORAL) at IIT Kharagpur have come up with new data confirming that the Antarctic Ozone Hole is on a healing path.

The researchers have collected data from 1979 to 2017, which shows though there was a loss in saturation of Ozone since 1987 over the Antarctic; the saturation of loss at 12-21 km has significantly reduced over the period 2001–2017.

This is the first of its kind research providing detailed long-term (four decades) analysis of Antarctic ozone loss saturation in terms of its first occurrence, timing, spatial differences, vertical spread, inter-annual changes and temporal evolution using high-resolution ozonesondes and satellite measurements inside the vortex for the said period.

“We have observed over the past four decades the Ozone layer depletion peaked during winters each year except the warm winters of 1988 and 2002. However, our analysis shows a clear reduction in the frequency of occurrence of ozone loss saturation over the period 2001–2017 consistently throughout various datasets. This reveals the emergence of an important milestone in ozone recovery,” confirmed Prof. Jayanarayanan Kuttippurath from IIT KGP who along with Pankaj Kumar, Prijitha J. Nair and P. C. Pandey from the IIT KGP CORAL team conducted the study which has recently been reported in the prestigious journal npj Climate and Atmospheric Science published by Springer Nature.

Data were collected for various altitudes from Autumn to Spring, over the decades, for stations across Antarctica, including measurements from the Indian station Maitri. The reduction of ozone loss saturation in recent years ranged from 20% to 60% across the data spread.

Is this going to affect the existing protocols and regulations for industrial emissions of ozone-depleting substances? Prof. J. Kuttippurath believes that the recovery indicated in the loss saturation layer, robustly suggests that the Montreal Protocol has definitely saved the ozone layer and climate of the southern hemisphere. Since there are already significant changes in the southern hemispheric climate owing to the Antarctic ozone loss, the recovery from loss saturation is very likely to affect that.

The ozone recovery process is very slow and it will take a few decades to get back to the pre-ozone hole levels. However, the emergence of ozone recovery is very clear even at the altitudes where the near-complete ozone loss occurs”, adds Prof. P. C. Pandey of CORAL, who is also the founder director of the National Centre for Antarctic and Ocean Research.