The record-breaking ozone hole that opened on the Arctic in March 2020 should close in mid-April. This is the estimate released by Diego Loyola, of the German space agency DLR, as surveillance by European sentinel satellites comes into play of the Earth. In particular, the Sentinel-5P satellite, of the Copernicus program managed by the European Commission and the European Space Agency (ESA), is monitoring daily ozone levels on the Arctic.
Sentinel-5P images, based on the Tropomi instrument and analyzed by the experts of the Drl, have allowed to control the progression on the Arctic from 9 March to 1 April 2020 of this hole in the ozone layer that protects us from ultraviolet rays and to realize an animation showing the extent of it, now three times Greenland.
“In the past, mini ozone holes have occasionally been observed over the North Pole, but - says Loyola - the impoverishment above the Arctic this year is much greater than in previous years. The ozone hole has a maximum extension of less than one million square kilometers: it is little compared to that of the ozone hole on Antarctica, which can extend up to 20-25 million square kilometers for a duration of 3 or 4 months". For the hole in the Arctic, the experts estimate is that "it can close in mid-April 2020".
The ozone layer extends into the stratosphere, approximately 10 to 50 kilometers. To protect it, the Montreal Protocol was signed in 1987 to progressively reduce the use of ozone-depleting gases, the so-called chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). It will take decades for these gases to completely disappear from the atmosphere, but thanks to the Montreal Protocol, the ozone hole in Antarctica, which forms every year in the fall, is at an all-time low.