The Largest Ever Ozone Hole Over the Arctic Has Now Healed

Back in early April, it was announced that CAMS¹ was tracking a record-breaking hole in the ozone above the Arctic:

Ozone columns over large parts of the Arctic have reached record-breaking low values this year, and the ozone layer over the Arctic is severely depleted at altitudes of around 18 km. The last time similarly strong chemical ozone depletion was observed over the Arctic was during spring 2011, and ozone depletion in 2020 seems on course to be even stronger.

The Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS*) has been closely following the rather unusual ozone hole that has formed over the Arctic this spring.

In late April, they then shared on Twitter that the hole had healed.

The unprecedented 2020 northern hemisphere #OzoneHole has come to an end. The #PolarVortex split, allowing #ozone-rich air into the Arctic, closely matching last week's forecast from the #CopernicusAtmosphere Monitoring Service.

More on the NH Ozone hole➡️https://t.co/Nf6AfjaYRi pic.twitter.com/qVPu70ycn4

— Copernicus ECMWF (@CopernicusECMWF) April 23, 2020

People were then assuming that this had something to do with the lockdowns happening all over the world because of COVID-19. However, they say that the lockdown probably had no effect on this and that it was due to an unusually strong and long-lived Polar Vortex.

Either way, it seemed like a pretty interesting thing to read about, so I thought I’d share. And I think I’m going to start following them on Twitter, as they seem to share a lot of intriguing bits of data.