(ORDO NEWS) — On February 9, 2023, the ozone instrument on the newly launched NOAA-21 satellite went live and collected data for its first global image within a week.
The Ozone Mapping and Profiling Kit (OMPS) consists of three sensors that monitor the Earth‘s ozone layer and track its recovery.
The map above, created using OMPS data, shows total atmospheric ozone concentrations around the globe.
Higher levels of ozone are concentrated in the extreme northern latitudes, which is typical for this time of year.
In the decade since the launch of the first OMPS on the Suomi-NPP satellite, the instrument’s capabilities have expanded to include observations of aerosols such as wildfire smoke, sulfur dioxide and volcanic ash.
For example, on February 17, 2023, OMPS detected volcanic aerosols still lingering from the powerful eruption of the Hunga Tonga volcano in the South Pacific, which released water vapor and sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere over a year ago.
OMPS detects what is known as “backscattered” light from the atmosphere sunlight that reflects off particles and gases in the atmosphere or off the Earth’s surface.
The area at the top of the map is grey, because it is polar night at the North Pole. Because backscattered sunlight cannot be detected, OMPS cannot measure there during this time.
OMPS looks at this backscattered light in two ways: the Nadir Mapper and Nadir Profiler point directly at Earth to map total ozone around the globe and collect accurate measurements at different altitudes, and the Limb Profiler examines the atmosphere from an angle.
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