Stratospheric ozone, Dobson history at Oxford

Over at Tallbloke’s the subject has got around to the stratosphere, including a post by Rog reporting on a lecture he attended at Leeds Uni. given by Susan Solomon.
Link here.

Seems apt to cover Dobson as a backgrounder.

As it happens I’ve been moving in the same direction as part of unravelling atmospheric matters. Image right is a thumbnail of an old page at Oxford Uni. Physics department which gives a potted history of G.M.B Dobson, a local physicist who made a life’s work of measurement of high atmosphere ozone. The measurement unit the Dobson is in his honour. Even more remarkably his photoelectric spectrophotometer is the standard instrument today, used around the world.

Click image or link

For example, World Meteorological Organisation “Operations Handbook – Ozone Observations with a Dobson Spectrophotometer. https://www.wmo.int/pages/prog/arep/gaw/documents/GAW183-Dobson-WEB.pdf and much more is available.

The page at Oxford (text link or click image) contains two pairs of links to local newspaper articles about the Dobson work at his home laboratory, one from 1957 and the other 1995. The difference in attitude is astounding as paranoia about the environment takes a hold.

Ozone data

You can get a rough look here OMI Ozone page a NASA http://macuv.gsfc.nasa.gov/OMIOzone.md

How accurate this is might be another matter.

Primer

Old Dominion University, Dept. of Ocean, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, U.S. Coast Guard Academy, provide some excellent online material

Stratospheric Ozone [link changed to last version on http://www.archive.org, please try to avoid excess server traffic]

An Electronic Textbook

[edited Sept 2014]

Advertisements