+ "text": "Step 4. Less is more\nInstead of plotting the month-by-month data, what if you only showed one month of data per year? That’s right: we’re going to throw out all the data for each year except for one month. That way we can focus on the year-to-year changes instead of the month-to-month changes. You get to choose the month (October, November, December, January, February or March).\nNow return to the questions we discussed in Step 3. Is the Ozone concentration getting higher or lower with time?\nNote: Ozone is part of the atmosphere which means that it has weather and variability. The video below is a visualization of Ozone data from 2025 from a European Union satellite\nVideo\nThe most important thing to take away from this video is that there is a lot going on down there at the South Pole and we are just looking at one number from one specific location at one specific time for how the Ozone layer is doing.\nThe second most important thing about this video is that the “hole” in the Ozone layer only exists for part of the year. We are ignoring this month-to-month variability but here is a quote from an article from climate.gov about month-to-month changes in the Ozone layer:\n“When the Sun rises at the end of Southern Hemisphere winter, sunlight degrades these reactive [CFC] gases, releasing ‘free radicals’ of chlorine. A single chlorine-containing free radical can catalyze the destruction of thousands and thousands of ozone molecules. Ozone destruction usually peaks in mid-October. Ozone loss tapers off in late spring as the polar vortex weakens. Temperatures rise, and fewer clouds form. Ozone-rich air from lower latitudes mixes back into the polar stratosphere, and the ozone hole disappears until the next spring.”"
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