|Image Credit: Markos Possel Mapos| A few weeks ago word spread
of the passing of F. Sherwood Rowland. The first notice was a
press release on the UC Irvine website. He had an illustrious
career as a chemist and won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry. I never
had the pleasure of meeting him, but there are few in
meteorology that didn’t know of him. Those who knew him can tell
you more about his career and they can be found at Real Climate
and Climate Progress. Rowland was a member of the National
Academy of Sciences where there is a wonderful tribute to him.
Rowland along with post-doctoral student Mario Molino found that
chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), a man-made substance, could be
highly destructive to ozone. One CFC could destroy up to 100,000
ozone molecules. This could be damaging to the ozone layer even
at concentration on the order of parts per billion. The
discovery led to their landmark paper published in Nature in
1974. There were no observations at the time to confirm this,
but it would not take long. The fir