Transcripts of G2011-059 On Board NPP: OMPS - All Things Ozone

Narrator: The Ozone MapperProfiler Suite or the OMPS instrument. This instrument will fly on NASA's NPP satellite and it is a key component to measuring the health of the stratospheric ozone layer. 

Scott: "In the stratosphere the ozone is very important to block ultra violet radiation from the sun protecting humans on Earth. 

Narrator: Ozone depletion is mainly caused by chlorine from human-produced substances called chlorofluorocarbons or CFCs. Back in the 70s, scientists predicted that ifCFCs continued to increase, they would eventually destroy the Earth's ozone layer. 

Paul Newman: So, the MontrealProtocol controls the production and emissions of these ozone-destroying gases and because of that most of these gases are no longer produced and they are slowly beginning to decline in our atmosphere. 

Narrator: A critical factor in measuring the success of these regulations, as well as to be able to predict future fluctuations in ozone levels, is the ability to collect long-term data from space. Built with precision and tested by a highly skilled team, the OMPS instrument comes along on NPP as the next generation ozone instrument. 

Paul Newman: The Ozone MapperProfiler Suite is an instrument that continues a series that began back in the 1970s. We now have about back in the 1970s. We now have about 40 years of measurements of total ozone around the globe. So, this is a key instrument to maintaining that record to follow how ozone is changing in our environment. 

Narrator: OMPS looks at the edge of the atmosphere and builds a profile of data that helps scientists see the vertical distribution of ozone and where it is in danger of depletion. 

Paul Newman: So, that's a big improvement over the old mapping instruments that just mapped out the total amount of ozone between space and the surface. 

Scott: So, the data you get back can produce maps to show you how much ozone is there and how it varies by altitude and that's very important for understanding both how ozone is distributed and how it's changing over time. 

Narrator: As NPP orbits theEarth over the poles once every 100 minutes, 14times a day; the OMPS instrument delivers its data as millions of ones and zeros to a ground station located near theNorth Pole in Svalbard, Norway. 

Joan: The ground station then delivers this in a manner that is then delivered to scientists and then they take that data and can map the UV globally. 

Paul Newman: So, total ozone data can be immediately used to compute for example UV index. In long term though we're going to be looking at the data to determine, is the Earth's ozone layer rebounding form the lower points we saw in the 1990's,that's the long term science result that we'd like to see. 

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