Atmospheric tracers during the 2003–2004 stratospheric warming event and impact of ozone intrusions in the troposphere

Abstract

Abstract. We use the stratospheric/tropospheric chemical transport model MOZART-3 to study the distribution and transport of stratospheric O 3 during the remarkable stratospheric sudden warming event observed in January 2004 in the northern polar region. A comparison between observations by the MIPAS instrument on board the ENVISAT spacecraft and model simulations shows that the evolution of the polar vortex and of planetary waves during the warming event plays an important role in controlling the spatial distribution of stratospheric ozone and the downward ozone flux in the lower stratosphere and upper troposphere (UTLS) region. Compared to the situation during the winter of 2002-2003, lower ozone concentrations were transported from the polar region to mid-latitudes, leading to exceptional large areas of low ozone concentrations outside the polar vortex and "low-ozone pockets" in the middle stratosphere. The unusually long-lasting stratospheric westward winds (easterlies) during the 2003-2004 event greatly restricted the upward propagation of planetary waves, causing the weak transport of ozone-rich air originated from low latitudes to the middle polar stratosphere (30 km). The restricted wave activities led to a reduced extratropical downward ozone flux from the lower stratosphere to the lowermost stratosphere (or from the "overworld" into the "middleworld"), especially over East Asia. Consequently, during wintertime (15 December∼15 February), the total downward ozone transport on 100 hPa surface by the descending branches of Brewer-Dobson cir- Moreover, during the two warming winters, the meridional CTOF caused by the isentropic transport associating with the enhanced wave activity also increased and played an important role in the total extratropical CTOF budget.

A comparative study of the major sudden stratospheric warmings in the Arctic winters 2003/2004–2009/2010

“…Our analysis also shows that the wave 1 MWs (e.g. Kuttippurath et al, 2011;Kleinböhl et al, 2005;Manney et al, 2005;Liu et al, 2009) usually end up with vortex displacement events, while the wave 2 MWs (e.g. Harada et al, 2010;Manney et al, 2009) generally lead to vortex split events, consistent with the findings of previous studies (e.g.…”

“…However, there were 7 MWs in 5 out of the 6 winters from 1998/99 to 2003/04 (e.g. Kuttippurath et al, 2011;Kleinböhl et al, 2005;Manney et al, 2005;Liu et al, 2009;Naujokat et al, 2002). The winter 1999/00 was unusually cold but each other winter was prone to MWs.…”

Middle stratospheric polar vortex ozone budget during the warming Arctic winter, 2002–2003

“…It is shown that the MOZART-3 model can generally represent the variation in distribution of both ozone and N 2 O concentrations during the SSW events. A similar comparison was performed in our previous study (Liu et al, 2009c). The point-to-point comparison on 20 January and 17 February 2003, as shown in Fig.…”

“…Previous studies show that the MOZART-3 model is suitable to represent stratosphere-troposphere exchange processes (Gettelman et al, 2004;Park et al, 2004) and ozone concentrations in the extratropical tropopause region (Pan et al, 2007;Liu et al, 2009a). Recently, the MOZART-3 model has been used to study the impact of SSW events on the distribution of stratospheric ozone and N 2 O (Liu et al, 2009c). The results show that the modeling can represent the variation in the stratospheric chemistry observed by the MIPAS satellite measurements during the 2002 well.…”

“…In the present study, the initial condition for chemical compounds is the same as that in the previous study by Liu et al (2009c). The seasonal simulation starts on 1 December 2002 and proceeds until 1 April 2003.…”