Determination of the chemical equator from GEOS-Chem model simulation: a focus on the tropical western Pacific region

Abstract

Abstract. The tropical western Pacific (TWP) plays an important role in global stratosphere–troposphere exchange and is an active region of the interhemispheric transport (IHT). Common indicators for transport between the hemispheres like the tropical rain belt are too broad or lack precision in the TWP. In this paper, we provide a method to determine the atmospheric chemical equator (CE), which is a boundary for air mass transport between the two hemispheres in the tropics. This method used the model output from an artificial passive tracer simulated by the chemical transport model GEOS-Chem in the troposphere. We investigated the movement of the CE in the tropics, which indicates the migration of atmospheric circulation systems and air mass origins. Our results show the CE on different timescales, suggesting that the different features of the IHT in different regions are highly related to the variation in the circulation systems. We compared the CE with the tropical wind fields, indicating that the region of IHT does not coincide with the convergence of the 10 m wind fields in the tropical land sectors and the TWP region. We compared the CE with the atmospheric composition such as satellite data of CH4 and model simulation of sulfur hexafluoride (SF6). The results show that the CE and north–south gradient of CH4 in the Indian Ocean in January are well consistent with each other, which indicates the CE has good potential to estimate the IHT inferred by observations. We discussed the vertical extent and the meridional extent of the IHT. We find that the vertical structure above 2 km has a slight northern tilt in the Northern Hemisphere (NH) winter season and a southern tilt in the NH summer, meaning the seasonality of the migration of the CE at the lower altitude is larger than that at the higher altitude. The meridional extent of the CE indicates a narrow transition zone where IHT happens throughout the year. We find that the meridional extent above South America is larger compared to other regions. The distribution of the land–sea contrast plays an important role in the meridional extent of IHT. We focus on the TWP region and further compared the tropical rain belt with the CE. There is a broad region of high precipitation occurring in the TWP region, and it is difficult to determine the IHT by the rain belt. In the NH winter, the CE is not consistent with the tropical rain belt in the TWP but is confined to the southern branch of the peak of the rain belt. For the other seasons, both indicators of IHT agree.

Measurement report: The Palau Atmospheric Observatory and its ozonesonde record – continuous monitoring of tropospheric composition and dynamics in the tropical western Pacific

“…In the UTLS, the Brewer-Dobson circulation and its interplay with the uprising branch of the Hadley circulation take over control. As the ITCZ acts as a boundary for interhemispheric transport (Sun et al, 2023), its position north of Palau from July until October inhibits transport of potentially polluted Northern Hemispheric air masses to the region, which further promotes the seasonal mid-tropospheric O 3 minimum and is further explored in back trajectory analysis by Müller et al (2023).…”

Properties of Cirrus Cloud Observed over Koror, Palau (7.3°N, 134.5°E), in Tropical Western Pacific Region

“…This indicates that there are larger ice particles during summer than in other seasons. During the monsoon season, when Palau is located in the south of the CE or the transition area [19], the TTL is humid and warm because of the intensive convective activities during this time. Under this circumstance, a great amount of deep convective cells occur in tropical oceanic regions and generate the spreading anvils and long-lived cirrus with larger particle sizes compared with the other seasons.…”

“…This deep convective mix-phased cloud generates widespread anvils in high altitudes where the temperature is very low and the freezing of the liquid droplets forms long-lived cirrus [16,17]. For certain cases, the convective forming cirrus is related to inter-hemispheric transport and is usually indicated by the term Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ) [18] or Chemical Equator (CE) [19]. The last forming mechanism, the cold trap [20], generates cirrus cloud by cooling and freezing during the slow and large-scale uplifting [15,21] and atmospheric temperature anomaly by Kelvin or gravity wave activity in the TTL region [12,22].…”

Air Mass Transport to the Tropical West Pacific Troposphere inferred from Ozone and Relative Humidity Balloon Observations above Palau

“…Very low O 3 values were only present in the "equatorial wedge" between ITCZ and SPCZ and associated with enhanced vertical mixing in convection in the absence of gross ground pollution. Palau is enclosed between these bands during ASO (Sun et al, 2023), therefore the best season to observe the clean air background. During FMA, when the ITCZ is located furthest south, transport from higher northern latitudes is possible.…”

“…Its unique location and year-round operation makes the PAO an excellent background site to study the influence of dynamics (c.f. Thompson et al, 2021;Sun et al, 2023).…”