15 Summary of the Evidence (The chlorine cycle)
Description
This article is from the Ozone Depletion: Stratospheric Chlorine and Bromine FAQ, by Robert Parson rparson@spot.colorado.edu with numerous contributions by others.
15 Summary of the Evidence (The chlorine cycle)
a. Inorganic chlorine, primarily of natural origin, is efficiently
removed from the troposphere; organic chlorine, primarily
anthropogenic, is not, and in the upper troposphere organic
chlorine dominates overwhelmingly.
b. In the stratosphere, organic chlorine decreases with altitude,
since at higher altitudes there is more short-wave UV available to
photolyze it. Inorganic chlorine _increases_ with altitude.
At the bottom of the stratosphere essentially all of the chlorine
is organic, at the top it is all inorganic, and reaction
intermediates such as COF2 are found at intermediate altitudes.
c. Both HCl and HF in the stratosphere have been increasing steadily,
in a correlated fashion, since they were first measured in the 1970's.
Reaction intermediates such as COF2 are also increasing.
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