Improvement in the 'hole' is marginal. The HFCs,CFC's and the other man-made gases emissions have been on the decline. There is no "echoing" of sound in this hole. It is a thining of the 03 high in the stratosphere. The earlier big hole posting did not describe the facts of the "hole" but if you were UV-B this would be a way to get most of the way to the surface and burn something alive. This is an older graphic of the area over the Antarctic where the ozone has been depleted from the atmosphere, and where, in summer, you can certainly get a tan to a crisp! NASA scientist James Hansen was involved in this graphic representation.

IF it weren't so Cold! (No real tanning on the ice; burning -- yes! Shades or slits and most men let their beards grow, for warmth.)

This picture is colored deeply blue over Antarctica and that means there is little protective Ozone. But, with GHG HFC's emissions down, conditions are getting better, even if the thinning has not repaired itself completely!

This is a relatively current and dynamic graphic depicting last years including the most recent austral summmer.

Below, is a link to the South Pole webCam. Depending on satellite availability you can watch live shots of the wind blowing. The wind chill has been running more that -100 F while the temperature has been below -75 F for sometime now.

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Ozone Facts
What is Ozone?

Ozone is a colorless gas. Chemically, ozone is very active; it reacts readily with a great many other substances. Near the Earth’s surface, those reactions cause rubber to crack, hurt plant life, and damage people’s lung tissues. But ozone also absorbs harmful components of sunlight, known as “ultraviolet B”, or “UV-B”. High above the surface, above even the weather systems, a tenuous layer of ozone gas absorbs UV-B, protecting living things below.
What is the Ozone Hole?

Each year for the past few decades during the Southern Hemisphere spring, chemical reactions involving chlorine cause ozone in the southern polar region to be destroyed rapidly and severely. This depletion is known as the “ozone hole”.

What is a Dobson Unit?

The Dobson Unit (DU) is the unit of measure for total ozone. If you were to take all the ozone in a column of air stretching from the surface of the earth to space, and bring all that ozone to standard temperature (0 °Celsius) and pressure (1013.25 millibars, or one atmosphere, or “atm”), the column would be about 0.3 centimeters thick. Thus, the total ozone would be 0.3 atm-cm. To make the units easier to work with, the “Dobson Unit” is defined to be 0.001 atm-cm. Our 0.3 atm-cm would be 300 DU.

http://neptune.gsfc.nasa.gov/publications/pdf/pubs2002/2_on_thin_ice.pdf

IMAGE: NASA
Cold, snowy, and stuck at the bottom of the Earth, Antarctica might seem like a dull place. But this big continent can produce a surprisingly dynamic range of conditions. One example of this range is temperature trends. Although Antarctica warmed around the perimeter from 1982 to 2004, where huge icebergs calved and some ice shelves disintegrated, it cooled closer to the pole.

This image shows trends in "skin temperatures" -- temperatures from roughly the top millimeter of the land or sea surface not air temperatures. The data were collected by the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) sensors that were flown on several National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) satellites. The data come from the AVHRR's thermal infrared channel a portion of the light spectrum we can sense as heat but that human eyes cannot see. This image shows temperature trends for the icy continent from 1982 to 2004. Red indicates areas where temperatures generally increased during that period, and blue shows where temperatures predominantly decreased.

The area of strongest cooling appears at the South Pole, and the region of strongest warming lies along the Antarctic Peninsula. In some instances, bright red spots or streaks along the edge of the continent show where icebergs calved or ice shelves disintegrated, meaning the satellite began seeing warmer ocean water where there had previously been ice. One example of this is the bright red line along the edge of the Ross Ice Shelf.

Why is Antarctica getting colder in the middle when it's warming up around the edge? One possible explanation is that the warmer temperatures in the surrounding ocean have produced more precipitation in the continents interior, and this increased snowfall has cooled the high-altitude region around the pole. Another possible explanation involves ozone. Ozone in the Earth's stratosphere absorbs ultraviolet radiation, and absorbing this energy warms the stratosphere. Loss of UV-absorbing ozone may have cooled the stratosphere and strengthened the polar vortex, a pattern of spinning winds around the South Pole. The vortex acts like an atmospheric barrier, preventing warmer, coastal air from moving in to the continent's interior. A stronger polar vortex might explain the cooling trend in the interior of Antarctica.
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And Buddy! For a quarter, I'll show you a live shot of some thing really Cool! LIVE! And you can see how cool it is!

http://www.usap.gov/videoClipsAndMaps/spWebCam.cfm

Yeah! Want to take a look at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station? this is cool, look at the temperature! As I write this,it is not "quite sunset" there, but our first day of spring will be their sunset day. At the Pole, it will take about 30.5 hours for the Sun to set, say a day-and-a-quarter.

http://www.xomba.com/south_pole_summer_just_winding_down

Realize the COLDEST PLACE on Earth is a few hundred miles, uh . . . North -- of here; At Vostok Station. It has a lake and everything, with the resort right out on Vostok Lake. it is like a Russian Resort at about 13,000 feet. Very kool.