21 CFCs are produced in the Northern Hemisphere, so how do they get down to the Antarctic?
Description
This article is from the Ozone Depletion: Stratospheric Chlorine and Bromine FAQ, by Robert Parson rparson@spot.colorado.edu with numerous contributions by others.
21 CFCs are produced in the Northern Hemisphere, so how do they get down to the Antarctic?
Vertical transport into and within the stratosphere is slow. It
takes more than 5 years for a CFC molecule released at sea level to
rise high enough in the stratosphere to be photolyzed. North-South
transport, in both troposphere and stratosphere, is faster - there is
a bottleneck in the tropics (it can take a year or two to get across
the equator) but there is still plenty of time. CFC's are distributed
almost uniformly as a function of latitude, with a gradient of ~10%
from Northern to Southern Hemispheres.
[Singh et al. 1979] [Elkins et al. 1993]
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