An advanced cutting-edge monitoring station, able to gather crucial data on pollution linked with damage to the earth's ozone layer, is to be established in the Gulf state of Qatar, it is first ozone and pollution monitoring ground station for West Asia.
The station will plug serious and significant ground and satellite-data gaps in the regional and global atmosphere monitoring networks, disclosed sources here on Tuesday. Currently the nearest similar ozone monitoring stations are between 800 km and 3,340 km away in Esfahan (Iran) and Nairobi, respectively. For halocarbon measurements the nearest stations are in central Europe (more than 4000 km away) and China (more than 6000 km away).
Scientists believe the new, more advanced station will assist in understanding whether the ozone layer, the thin layer of gas that surrounds the planet and protects all life on earth from the sun's harmful rays, is actually recovering after decades of chemical attack.
Under the UN Environment Programme's (UNEP) Montreal Protocol over 90 percent of ozone damaging gases have already been phased out and it is predicted that the layer might have fully recovered by somewhere around the 2060s as a result of past, current and future actions. But without direct scientific observations around the world governments cannot know whether improvements are genuinely taking place or whether there is a need to step up or refocus the response.
Last year governments agreed to accelerate the freeze and phase-out of replacement chemicals known as HCFCs in large part because of their global warming potential. Experts believe the maximum contribution of the phase out will come by introducing new, low or zero global warming gases backed by new, energy saving equipment, one of the issues, which the new centre seeks to resolve.
The data collected and analysed at the new observatory in Qatar will be archived at various international data centres, such as the World Meteorological Organisation's World Ozone and UV radiation Data Centre (Canada) and World Data Centre on Greenhouse Gases (Japan). The data will thereby be available for the global scientific community.
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