A wavelength-channel error at the South Pole Dobson station manufactured false disagreement that delayed OPT's confidence in its own ozone-hole satellite data

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Richard McPeters' 1990 letter (see claim-mcpeters-1990-letter-dates-opt-investigation-to-july-1984 for full provenance) supplies a specific technical reason NASA's Ozone Processing Team did not immediately confirm and report its own anomalous readings: when OPT checked its satellite data against the only Antarctic ground-based Dobson instrument then reporting — the Amundsen-Scott station at the South Pole — the two disagreed sharply. The satellite recorded ozone below 180 Dobson Units; the ground station reported around 300 DU, in the normal range.

McPeters attributes the mismatch to an instrument fault at the ground station, not the satellite, citing a separate primary source: "As noted in a paper by Komhyr et al. (1986), 'data previously reported for October–December 1983 have been identified as erroneous and uncorrectable (observations were incorrectly made on A', C', and D' rather than on A, C, and D wavelengths).'" (Komhyr, Grass & Leonard, "Total ozone decrease at South Pole, Antarctica, 1964–1985," Geophysical Research Letters 13, 1248–1251, 1986 — cited within the letter, not independently fetched this session.)

This sharpens myth-nasa-software-discarded-the-ozone-hole's vaguer claim that "the real bottleneck was internal communication and publication timing, not algorithmic blindness": the specific bottleneck was a validation failure, not a processing or communication one. OPT's satellite instrument was correct; the ground-truth check meant to confirm it was independently broken, manufacturing exactly the kind of disagreement that would make a careful team hesitate before publishing a dramatic finding.