Making sunbathing safer
Sunbathing could become a lot safer in the future thanks to a system, developed by KNMI (Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute) within the European Space Agency's (ESA) 'Data user programme', which should provide extremely accurate weather forecasts including ozone information. The 'fast ozone profile' service is a unique service which harnesses satellite data to powerful high-speed computing. It can deliver a three dimensional map of the ozone in the atmosphere worldwide within a few hours, reports ESA. The speed of the new service makes it possible to broadcast warnings far more quickly, making forecasts of potential danger from ultraviolet rays more accurate and reducing the risk of sunburn and more seriously, skin cancer, it says. 'The main reason for making this service available is to enable the creation of improved weather forecasts,' says Ronald van der A, a senior project scientist at KNMI. 'Ozone moves with the wind in the high atmosphere - we call it a stratospheric tracer. Because we can generate these three-dimensional profiles quickly, we can create moving maps from a series of snapshots, and so start to model the behaviour of the stratosphere much more accurately.' Although it will still take three days to cover the Earth's surface, the near-real-time processing will allow a complete global picture to be available in the same timeframe, which is a major advance over any previous efforts. 'Equally', adds Ronald van der A, 'because we can see events developing quickly, if we spot a hole appearing, we can alert local scientists who can then monitor the event hour by hour using equipment carried aboard specially-launched balloons, called sondes.' The service is now live, providing ozone profiles to scientists around Europe. Professor van der A added that the service will continue following the launch of Envisat, and that the SCIAMACHY instrument aboard Envisat may well improve the quality of the service still further.
Kraje
Netherlands