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Abstract
Thinning of the atmospheric ozone layer leads to elevated levels of Ultraviolet-B (UVB) at the Earth's surface, resulting in an increase of health risks to living organisms due to DNA damage. This paper examines the multidecadal changes of total column ozone from 1979 to 2005 with the aid of ground-based UVB stations using the ultraviolet multifilter rotating shadow-band radiometer (UV-MFRSR). For the purpose of demonstration, four USDA ground stations, WA01, CO01, MD01, and AZ01, were selected for detailed comparisons against the satellite data. The major finding of this study is that over the course of the time series, on a monthly scale, the UV index (UVI) has increased at the four selected USDA stations while total ozone has decreased in the continental USA over the past three decades and spatial distributions of UVI and total ozone have shown substantial variations from coastal zones to the Midwest Regions of the USA, yet the tendency toward recovery of ozone layer in the continental USA cannot be fully confirmed. This leads to a conclusion that the UVI changes might have been influenced by other factors in addition to the total ozone in the atmospheric environment across at least 76% of the continental USA.
Highlights
Concern over the harmful effects of increased solar UV radiation on the biosphere due to thinning of the atmospheric ozone layer has prompted extensive efforts to characterize it at the Earth’s surface, which can help identify its impacts over differing latitudes [1,2,3]
This paper presents a comparative analysis to examine the changes and inconsistencies of total ozone in recent years, investigating the temporal and spatial differences of both sources of data over the continental USA Intercomparisons were made between the total column ozone calculated with the National Aeronautical and SpaceAdministration (NASA) Nimbus-7/total ozone mapping spectrometer (TOMS) UV algorithm and the total ozone concentrations from United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) ground-based network between 1979 and 2005
For the four representative ground-based stations, we produced the derived daily UV index (UVI) data measured by the broadband UVB-1 Pyranometer and the TOMS instrument from 1999 to 2005 for statistical analyses (Table 1)
Summary
Concern over the harmful effects of increased solar UV radiation on the biosphere due to thinning of the atmospheric ozone layer has prompted extensive efforts to characterize it at the Earth’s surface, which can help identify its impacts over differing latitudes [1,2,3]. The spatial coverage of UV radiation monitoring sites is still too sparse and the historical record is still too short to determine the global-scale UV pattern and trends using UV radiation measurements alone [4,5]. Space-borne observation can provide information on two key parameters that determine UV irradiance: total ozone amount and the cloud transmittance or reflectivity. Satellite UV retrievals have been developed using the total ozone mapping spectrometer (TOMS) onboard the National Aeronautical and Space. Administration (NASA) Nimbus 7 satellite to provide continuous spatial coverage over the whole planet. TOMS, which has provided both total ozone and cloud reflectivity measurements since 1979, is an important source of derived UV data [6,7,8]
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