AGU: Geophysical Research Letters

 

Editors' Highlight

Ozone hole recovery and climate change

Over the past decades, the Southern Hemisphere's polar climate has undergone significant changes, in particular a strengthening of summertime westerly winds at the surface. Climate models link such changes to the depletion of stratospheric polar ozone and the increase of anthropogenic greenhouse gases, the former being the more dominant factor. Now that successful control of ozone-depleting substances has facilitated the recovery of the ozone hole, Perlwitz et al. (2008) used a chemistry climate model to simulate how this recovery will affect the Southern Hemisphere's climate. They found that if the ozone hole closes by 2100, surface wind patterns caused by ozone depletion between 1970 and 2000 will almost reverse despite increasing greenhouse gas concentrations. On the basis of these results and results from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Fourth Assessment Report, the authors stressed that including stratospheric processes in climate assessments will be necessary for accurate simulations of future climate change.

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