Level: advanced
Reference: Sydney Chapman, "A Theory of Upper-Atmospheric Ozone," Memoirs of the Royal Meteorological Society 3(26), 103-25 (1930).
Notes: Sydney Chapman (1888-1970) was a mathematical physicist who applied his talents of mathematical analysis mainly to problems in earth science. The most "chemical" of his works were a treatment of diffusion within the kinetic model of gases and the proposal and analysis of a kinetic model for stratospheric ozone. Chapman's own analysis of his ozone model was much more detailed than the equilibrium calculation these exercises require. The analysis included reactions (1) and (5) and concluded that they were negligible; it examined some of the rate constants, in particular their temperature and pressure dependences and their implications; and it defined some limiting cases.
The Chapman model turned out to be unable to account quantitatively for ozone abundances even in the natural atmosphere, let alone for the atmosphere perturbed by emissions of gases of human origin that became important decades after Chapman proposed his model. Still, it remains at the core of the much more extensive models of ozone kinetics used by current atmospheric scientists.
Solutions: To download solutions, go to:
http://web.lemoyne.edu/giunta/classicalcs/chapman.doc
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