Less Ozone Than Feared
Pollution by ozone in Costa Rica is not as high as it was feared.

This was one of the findings of the Ticosonde Project, after two years of research by Costa Rican scientists supported by NASA.

The findings show that in the San José metropolitan area the presence of ozone reaches up to the first kilometer in altitude during the day, but that it disappears at night, which shows that pollution is not high.

As part of the Project, radio probes were released to measure weather conditions, gases, water vapor and ozone in the atmosphere, up to 30 kilometers.

Ticosonde is a collaboration between NASA, the North American Monsoon Experiment (NAME), the Instituto Meteorológico Nacional and four other academic and scientific institutions in Costa Rica to characterize the vertical structure and temporal variability of the atmosphere over Central America during summer.

Tropical Cloud Systems Processes experiment in the summer of 2005 are useful for characterizing the temporal variability on a regional scale within the intertropical convergence zone lying over Costa Rica during this period.