When COVID-19 pandemic began in the US, counties and cities across the nation imposed stay at home orders, closed schools or imposed travel restrictions. From March 2020 onward, many Americans hung up car keys and settled into their homes for work and school. Traffic patterns dramatically changed, and previously smog filled vistas became clearer.
New research from NOAA finds that fragrant personal care products - the stuff that makes you smell good - are now responsible for a significant amount of the ozone pollution known as smog that plagues major urban areas.
Researchers have mapped global ground-level ozone concentrations by year for the Global Burden of Disease study using a data fusion approach, the first time this method was applied to ozone observations.
New analyses of global air measurements show that five years after an unexpected spike in emissions of the banned ozone-depleting chemical chlorofluorocarbon CFC-11, they dropped sharply between 2018 and 2019.
World View Enterprises has offered to carry a miniaturized NOAA instrument on its high-altitude balloon to capture measurements of atmospheric particles on a series of flights in 2021 that will last weeks and cover thousands of miles at altitudes above 55,000 feet.
NOAA has launched a wide-ranging research effort to investigate the impact of reduced vehicle traffic, air travel, shipping, manufacturing and other activities on Earth’s atmosphere and oceans due to the response to COVID-19.
A NOAA study published in the journal Nature demonstrates a profound effect of the Montreal Protocol: as levels of ozone-depleting chemicals controlled by the intenational treaty declined, a poleward shift of summertime circulation patterns in the Southern Hemisphere halted.
Weather conditions were ripe for a big ozone hole this year. But declining levels of ozone-depleting chemicals kept it to near-average size.
Emissions of one of the chemicals most responsible for the Antarctic ozone hole are on the rise, despite an international treaty that required an end to its production in 2010, a new NOAA study shows.