Let's assume we detect a coming supernova explosion within 50 light years from earth. As speculated by scientists, this will destroy our planet's ozone layer, giving all the life on the planet an hard time to survive.
Would it be feasible to produce and stock ozone before the event and then release it afterwards (chem trails for good, yay!) to speed up (mind, speed up, not full repair) the natural rebuilding?
As Yogev Levy mentioned, you can't store it for too long, but you can create it. Ozone is created from oxygen by UV light (from the sun) and from electrical discharges (lightning storms).
So, can we use this to re-create the ozone layer? Maybe
It is not feasible to fly around with UV lamps to try to generate ozone; too much UV is required to have any real effect so we would need several planes covered with UV lamps and carrying nothing but the pilot(s) and batteries. However, we can create lightning. A previous way to create lightning have been to shoot up small rockets carrying a wire. With the wire connected to a generator down on the ground, we could cause a discharge. The "latest" (it's over a decade old) way is to ionize the air with a laser, which causes a connection that allows for a discharge. Causing lightnings would be an easier way as we don't have to fly around, we could simply have diesel generators on trucks and drive around shooting laser and rockets into the sky... Although, without calculating anything on the matter, I must say that it might take too long time to be really effective, it would probably turn out to not really work as it might require too much energy still before a reasonable ozone layer have been created. But, every single O$_3$ molecule helps, so even if we can't create the entire ozone layer back, we can at least help while the sun continues to bathe us in UV and slowly rebuilds it.
According to this:
The main thing is that ozone is unstable and doesn't live very long so it is impractical to make a large quantity and store it.
, so - no.
But maybe there are other ways to restore the Ozone layer?
Short answer: No. Ozone is unstable and doesn't last long, generally around a month, and so trying to pump it into the atmosphere for a sustained period would not just be impractical, it would verge on the impossible.
Long answer: Ozone is O3, and the bonding of these Oxygen molecules is a chemical reaction that naturally takes place when the sun shines on the air. To my understanding, it's the absorption of UV rays that causes the reaction. Ozone is in far greater concentrations in the layer... but it's still only around 1% of the air up there (12-19 miles above Earth). While this doesn't sound particularly dense, I (in my limited maths capabilities) worked out the volume of the zone to be around 10,000,000,000 cubic kilometers.
Side note: OK, that sounds ridiculous. Did I do maths wrong?
Using the volume of a sphere equation, and taking the Ozone layer to be between 20 and 30km above Earth's surface, I get the upper limit of the OL to be around 1.1*10^12 - 1.09*10^12, and the Google calculators work that out to be 10,000,000,000. Did I go wrong somewhere? Probably.
Anyway, back to the question at hand. Ozone is at around a 1% concentration in the OL, so that would mean, assuming the calculatons are correct, you need 100,000,000 cubic kilometers of Ozone to completely refill the OL. Every month. Yeah... Good luck with that.
To sum up: if the OL will naturally regenerate, then you'd have to survive under intense UV rays until the barrier reforms. If not... you'd almost certainly die.
Please tell me if my maths went wrong somewhere because these numbers simply don't look right.
Assuming a somewhat higher level of technology, a station on the Moon could be built to mine regolith and extract oxygen out of the minerals. Using the abundant energy from the sun, the oxygen energized into ozone, liquified and sent via mass driver to the Earth. The tanks are designed to disintegrate in the upper atmosphere where the ozone is released.
As a practical matter there will have to be a ridiculously large moon base with robotic tools to create enough ozone, and the ozone would really be only a stopgap (since ozone is created and destroyed in a continuing basis by the actions of UV rays). The best way to assist in protecting the Earth is to preferentially release the ozone containers to disintegrate in hemisphere facing the supernova.
