This online platform uses data from the Copernicus Sentinel-5P satellite and shows the daily chlorine dioxide concentrations across the globe, as well as monthly, seasonal and yearly moving averages.
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Chlorine dioxide can be used as a proxy for stratospheric chlorine activation, which leads to ozone depletion. While OClO is not directly involved in ozone destruction, its concentration is proportional to the abundances of ClO and BrO. With BrO concentrations being much less variable than those of ClO, OClO can be used as a quantitative measure of chlorine activation, at least at solar zenith angles around twilight.
Enhanced OClO columns are expected mainly in Polar spring in both hemispheres, during some volcanic eruptions, and in strong lee-wave events at high latitudes. The S5PI+ OClO project is one of the seven themes of ESA’s Sentinel-5p+ Innovation activity, which aims at developing products for the TROPOMI instrument on the Sentinel-5 Precursor satellite which are not yet part of the operational processor.
The maps shown on this site have been based on the Sentinel-5P chlorine dioxide (OClO) slant column product, developed by the Institute of Environmental Physics (University of Bremen) and available from the S5P-PAL Data Portal. The Product User Manual (PUM) for this dataset can be found here.