Joe Farman
Joseph Charles Farman CBE was a British geophysicist who worked for the British Antarctic Survey. Together with Brian Gardiner and Jon Shanklin, he published the discovery of the ozone hole over Antarctica, having used Dobson ozone spectrophotometers. Their results were first published in May 1985.
Early life
Farman was born in Norwich. His father was a builder, and his mother was a primary school teacher, and he had a sister eight years older than himself.Education and career
He was educated at Norwich School, where he was a prefect in Coke House, and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, where he gained an undergraduate degree in Natural Sciences. After graduation, Farman worked with De Havilland, an aircraft manufacturer. In 1956, he responded to an advert for a job for a physicist to work in Antarctica. He was appointed to this role, and joined the Falkland Islands Dependencies Survey, which later became the British Antarctic Survey. Farman worked for the British Antarctic Survey until 1990, when he retired.Farman began work at the Halley research station on the Brunt Ice Shelf in Antarctica in 1957, where he deployed instruments for making atmospheric measurements including a Dobson meter, for measuring ozone. In early 1982, Farman noticed that the 25-year old instrument began to show dips in recorded ozone levels. In October 1982, the ozone values fell to remarkably low levels. Once Farman and colleagues were confident that the measurements were correct, they published their observations in the journal Nature; this was the first evidence for the presence of a seasonal ozone 'hole' over Antarctica, caused by chemical reactions of manmade halocarbons with stratospheric ozone during the Antarctic spring.