---
title: "Richard McPeters"
type: "entity"
entity_kind: "person"
status: "hub"
canonical_name: "Richard McPeters"
aliases: []
first_seen: "2026-08-21T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
connects_to: ["Ozone Processing Team","NASA Goddard Space Flight Center","TOMS (Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer)",[["entity-friedrich-pukelsheim|Friedrich Pukelsheim"]],"ozone hole discovery history"]
seek_code_commit: "17d9798"
---


NASA atmospheric scientist who, as Head of the Ozone Processing Team (OPT) at Goddard Space Flight Center, wrote a 1990 first-person account of how his team detected, checked, and reported the Antarctic ozone anomaly in 1984 — a year before the anomaly's published discovery. That letter, addressed to statistician [[entity-friedrich-pukelsheim|Friedrich Pukelsheim]] and reproduced in *The IMS Bulletin*, is the vault's Tier 1 anchor for correcting a popular myth about NASA's role in the ozone hole's discovery: not that software silently discarded the finding, but that a broken ground-truth instrument delayed the team's confidence in data it had already flagged as real.

## References
- [[claim-mcpeters-1990-letter-dates-opt-investigation-to-july-1984]]
- [[claim-opt-abstract-reported-ozone-anomaly-late-1984-december-unconfirmed]]
- [[claim-south-pole-dobson-station-error-delayed-opt-ozone-confirmation]]
- [[myth-nasa-software-discarded-the-ozone-hole]] — the myth ledger his letter corrects
- Related hubs: [[entity-friedrich-pukelsheim]]