The Impact of Rocket-Emitted Chlorine on Stratospheric Ozone
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract. Although stratospheric ozone is recovering under the Montreal Protocol, the rapidly expanding space industry may influence the pace of this recovery. We assess the potential for rocket-emitted chlorine, under various launch growth scenarios, to offset the decline in chlorine from regulated Ozone Depleting Substances (ODSs). We used the Whole Atmosphere Community Climate Model (WACCM6) nudged to meteorological reanalyses to simulate realistic atmospheric variability. A modest (times ten) increase in chlorine emissions from rocket launches relative to 2019 causes a near-global column ozone loss of less than 0.1 Dobson Unit (DU) (0.04 %), while a large (times 52) increase leads to 0.6 DU (0.23 %) depletion. Local ozone decreases reach 0.4 % and 2 % in the upper stratosphere for these scenarios. Column losses peak at high latitudes, with strong seasonality and meteorology-driven variability in the Arctic. The impact peaks in October in the Antarctic (0.5 DU and 3 DU depletion for ×10 and ×52 cases), and in April in the Arctic (generally up to 2 DU for the ×52 case, or greater than 8 DU in cold years with meteorology such as 2010/11). Ozone depletion throughout the stratosphere scales linearly with chlorine enhancement. Overall, while the effects of rocket-emitted chlorine under plausible growth scenarios are small, they could partially offset the gains achieved by the Montreal Protocol and should be considered in future assessments of rocket propulsion systems and ozone layer recovery projections.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".