Abstract

Six high altitude balloon flights were completed during the summer of 2017 to measure the effect of the total solar eclipse on Earth’s ozone over the eastern Snake River Plain in Idaho. The stratospheric ozone layer undergoes a noisy diurnal pattern driven primarily by photochemistry above 30 km and by atmospheric dynamics for altitudes below 30 km. The flights for this project rarely exceeded that boundary and were an attempt to detect photochemistry effects in the lower stratosphere. The first five flights determined a baseline for the distribution of ozone from ground level to the mid-stratosphere. The sixth flight was done during the total solar eclipse and was compared to the baseline. These data were also compared to multiple years’ data taken in the Uintah Basin in northeast Utah. All measurements were consistent with each other and show spatial and temporal variations in the ozone column that are expected. The balloon’s instrumentation payload was at the tropopause during eclipse totality and no change in either temperature or ozone was detected that was above the normal noise level in the previous data sets. The conclusion is that no photochemical processes are strong enough to clearly modify Earth’s ozone in the lower stratosphere on timescales shorter than three hours. This is consistent with previously reported satellite data of total column ozone.

How to Cite:

Sohl, J. E., Page, J. D., Lawton, R. D. & Trbovich, S., (2017) “No change detected on Earth’s mid-latitude atmospheric ozone by the 2017 Total Solar Eclipse”, Academic High Altitude Conference 2017(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.31274/ahac.5561