Ozone Hole May Warm Planet Earth Due to Shifting Winds and Clouds

There's been a lot of confusion when it comes to the hole in the ozone. While some scientists have attributed a slight cooling effect to the hole in the past, others believed that there was more of a warming effect. Now, a new study reveals that the ozone hole may actually have a slight warming influence on our Earth.

Each ozone molecule consists of three oxygen atoms bound together. These molecules gather in the lower portion of the stratosphere about 12 to 19 miles above the ground, which is about twice as high as commercial airliners fly. This layer of ozone helps shield our planet from some of the harmful effects of space radiation, but the ozone began to start thinning around the 1980s.

During that time, scientists discovered that a hole had formed above Antarctica during the Southern Hemisphere's spring months. It turned out that chlorofluorocarbons were the main cause of this hole, including Freon from cooling systems along with aerosols cans and degreasing solvents.

This hole has a somewhat odd effect on our planet, though. It impacts the Southern Hemisphere polar jet stream, the fast flowing air currents that encircle the South Pole. While this hole only appears during the spring months, throughout each subsequent summer the high-speed jet stream swings south toward the pole.

"For some reason when you put an ozone hole in the Southern Hemisphere during springtime, you get this robust poleward shift in the jet stream during the following summer sweason," said Kevin Grise, the lead author of the new paper, in a news release. "People have been looking at this for 10 years and there's still no reason why this happens."

So what does this mean for the Earth's atmosphere? The scientists used computer models in order to find out. As the jet stream shifts, storm systems move along with it toward the pole. This means that the clouds move with them. This, in turn, causes the amount of energy that the clouds can reflect to drop, which increases the amount of radiation reaching the ground.

"Theoretically this net radiation input into the system should give some sort of temperature increase, but it's unknown if that signal could be detected or what the magnitude of it would be," said Grise in a news release.

The findings do reveal that it's very likely that there is a slight warming effect associated with this ozone hole, rather than a cooling effect. The research could impact climate models and could allow scientists to better predict weather patterns.

The findings are published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.