NOORDWIJK, Netherlands, Jan 24 (AFP) - The most ambitious experiment ever made to keep track of changes in world's ozone layer is in danger of grinding to a halt next year because of lack of money, a European Space Agency scientist warned this week. The Global Ozone Monitoring Experiment (GOME) which uses the most sophisticated radar equipment in the history of environmental surveillance by satellite, provides a global map of the ozone layer and of nitrous oxide levels every three days. It has notably yielded spectacular images of the "hole" in the ozone layer over Antarctica. GOME which was launched on April 21 1995 has worked perfectly up to now, according to Guy Duchossoy who is in charge of global monitoring at the ESA. Presenting the first results of the experiment to the press on Tuesday, he said the ESA had to convince its 14 member countries to put up an extra 80 to 100 million ECUs (102 to 128 million dollars) if the project were to continue after May 1997. ERS-2 data is now supplied free to scientists but a market for it exists notably with oil companies, environment ministries, the European Union's agricultural commission, all of whom use three-dimensional maps. Despite the worries of funding, scientists are euphoric about the quality of the date supplied by GOME. They include Paul Crutzen, the winner of the 1995 Nobel prize for chemistry, who works for the Max Planck Institute of Chemistry in Mainz, Germany. He said the project had confirmed the presence of bromium in the stratosphere and had detected traces of chlorous oxide. It had also confirmed that the "hole" in the ozone layer covering around 20 million square kilometres (8,000,000 square miles) - twice the size of Europe - above the Antarctic was relatively stable. AFP /AA1234/240502 GMT JAN 96

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