Joe Farman

Joseph Charles Farman was an English geophysicist, born in 1930 in Norwich and died in 2013. Working for the British Antarctic Survey at Halley research station, he used decades of ground based ozone measurements from a Dobson spectrophotometer to notice, beginning in 1982, a sharp springtime decline in stratospheric ozone over Antarctica. Publishing the finding in 1985 with colleagues Brian Gardiner and Jonathan Shanklin, he announced the discovery of the Antarctic ozone hole, a nearly fifty percent seasonal ozone loss that was quickly linked to chlorofluorocarbons and helped drive the 1987 Montreal Protocol.