Voices of Science

Joseph Farman (1930-2013) was an atmospheric scientist who, along with colleagues Brian Gardiner and Jonathan Shanklin of the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), published the paper in Nature in 1985 that reported what became known as the ‘ozone hole’. This paper drew on measurements of atmospheric ozone made since 1957 in Antarctica using instruments called Dobson Spectrometers or Spectrophotometers. After graduatingfrom the University of Cambridge in mathematics Farman worked for most of his career at the BAS, having joined what was then the Falklands Islands Dependency Survey in 1956 after a brief career in defence research. After retiring from the BAS in 1990 he worked as a consultant to the European Ozone Research Coordinating Unit in Cambridge.