Richard McPeters

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 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
• observation-docsub-and-mcpeters-are-unflagged-diplomatics-cluster-members — his 1990 letter classified as a diplomatics-cluster member
• Related hubs: entity-friedrich-pukelsheim

Updates

• 2026-09-22: his 1990 letter's dating move — a first-person eyewitness account preferred over a later secondary paraphrase — was found to be a genuine, previously unflagged member of the vault's diplomatics cluster (dated-primary-source-overrules-received-attribution), the same evidentiary genre Mabillon founded in 1681, reached via a bipartite bridge-check against an unrelated Werbos/DOCSUB claim at cosine 0.84 (observation-docsub-and-mcpeters-are-unflagged-diplomatics-cluster-members).