The Success of the Montreal Protocol for Climate Mitigation: Antarctica Ozone hole Recovery Perspective

The monitoring of the ozone in the Earth’s atmosphere began in the 1970s due to its absorbing nature of radiation from the Sun, which is harmful to humans and prevents it from reaching the surface of the Earth. However, considerable global attention has been drawn after the finding of the ozone hole, which is associated with a significant drop in total columnar ozone (TCO), specifically a fall in stratospheric ozone (SO) during the spring of 1984. Since then, numerous studies on the Antarctic ozone hole have been conducted following the Vienna Convention and its Montreal Protocol (the ozone treaties) to sustain the ozone layer. In response to this, the Montreal Protocol was developed under the umbrella of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) to protect the thinning of the ozone layer. With 197 participating nations, it is a substantial step toward universal ratification. 

Towards this, the present study utilized TCO data from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)'s Nimbus-7/Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer (TOMS), TOMS-Earth Probe, and Aura/Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI) sensors at various time periods. Due to the varied spatial resolution of the missions, daily data were resampled to 1˚×1˚ (latitude × longitude) and generated daily unified spatial resolution matrixes.