Planetary waves in ozone and temperature in the Northern Hemisphere winters of 2002/2003 and early 2005

Abstract

Abstract. Temperature and ozone data from the submillimetre radiometer (SMR) installed aboard the Odin satellite have been examined to study the relationship between temperature and ozone concentration in the lower and upper stratosphere in winter time. The retrieved ozone and temperature profiles have been considered between the range of 24-46 km during the Northern Hemisphere (NH) winter of December 2002 to March 2003 and January to March 2005. A comparison between the ozone mixing ratio and temperature fields has been made for the zonal means, wavenumber one variations and 5-day planetary waves. The amplitude values in temperature variations are ∼5 K in the wavenumber one and 0.5-1 K in the 5-day wave. In ozone mixing ratio, the amplitudes reach ∼0.5 ppmv in the wavenumber one and 0.05-0.1 ppmv in the 5-day wave.Several stratospheric warming events were observed during the NH winters of 2002/2003 and early 2005. Along with these warming events, amplification of the amplitude has been detected in wavenumber one (up to 30 K in temperature and 1.25 ppmv in ozone) and partly in the 5-day perturbation (up to 2 K in temperature and 0.2 ppmv in ozone).In general, the results show the expected in-phase behavior between the temperature and ozone fields in the lower stratosphere due to dynamic effects, and an out-of-phase pattern in the upper stratosphere, which is expected as a result of photochemical effects. However, these relationships are not valid for zonal means and wavenumber one components when the wave amplitudes are changing dramatically during the strongest stratospheric warming event (at the end of December 2002/beginning of January 2003). Also, for several shorter intervals, the 5-day perturbations in ozone and temperature are not well-correlated at lower heights, particularly when conditions change rapidly. Good agreement between the temperature fields from Odin and ECMWF data is found at middle latitude where, in general, the 5-day perturbations from the two data sets coincide in both phase and amplitude throughout the examined interval. Analysis of the wavenumber one and the 5-day wave perturbations in temperature and ozone fields from Odin and from Aura demonstrates that, for the largest part of the examined period, quite similar characteristics are found in the spatial and temporal domain, with slightly larger amplitude values seen by Aura. Hence, the comparison between the Odin data, sampled each third day, and daily data from Aura and the ECMWF shows that the Odin data are sufficiently reliable to estimate the properties of the 5-day oscillations, at least for the locations and time intervals with strong wave activity.

Far‐Ranging Impact of Mountain Waves Excited Over Greenland on Stratospheric Dehydration and Rehydration

“…It turned out that the period end of January 2005, as investigated by Jiménez et al (2006) and Maturilli and Dörnbrack (2006) also attracted attention by atmospheric dynamicists as the polar vortex was disturbed by planetary waves (Belova et al, 2009;Chshyolkova et al, 2007). Limpasuvan et al (2007) studied the deep vertical propagation of mountain waves at the east coast of Greenland and their interaction with the Arctic polar vortex.…”

“…It turned out that the period end of January 2005, as investigated by Jiménez et al. (2006) and Maturilli and Dörnbrack (2006) also attracted attention by atmospheric dynamicists as the polar vortex was disturbed by planetary waves (Belova et al., 2009; Chshyolkova et al., 2007). Limpasuvan et al.…”

Quasi-16-day period oscillations observed in middle atmospheric ozone and temperature in Antarctica

“…As a result, variations in temperature caused by PWs drive the reactions nonlinearly and cause corresponding changes in the O 3 concentration. The inverse temperature dependence of the O 3 production reactions lead to a negative correlation (or an anti-correlation) between the O 3 and temperature fluctuations (Finger et al, 1995;Huang et al, 2008;Belova et al, 2009). The magnitudes of the correlation coefficient minimise near the stratopause, where the power spectral amplitudes are also a minimum.…”

“…Middle atmospheric O 3 has been shown to vary out of phase with temperature (Finger et al, 1995; Published by Copernicus Publications on behalf of the European Geosciences Union. Belova et al, 2009) Espy et al (2006) and Straub et al (2013). Here we use O 3 volume mixing ratio (vmr) profiles retrieved from one-hour averaged O 3 spectra centred around midnight local time recorded between July and September 2009.…”