Spatial and Temporal Distribution of O3 in the Remote Troposphere from the NASA ATom Mission: Current State and Climatology.
Abstract
Ozone (O3) is a primary driver of tropospheric photochemistry, a short-lived climate forcer and a major ground-level pollutant. Reducing tropospheric O3 concentration is a key component of international policy decisions that address global warming and air quality issues. However, efforts to reduce O3 rely heavily on our understanding of the complex chemical interactions that produce or destroy tropospheric O3. In particular, remote and sensitive regions are significantly more affected by rising anthropogenic emissions of pollutants. It is important that global Chemistry-Climate models (CCMs) correctly represent atmospheric processes to accurately predict long-term changes in atmospheric O3. Currently, CCMs O3 predictions widely diverge, in part because of a lack of sufficient global observations to constrain them.
The Atmospheric Tomography mission (ATom) is a NASA airborne field mission designed to capture the seasonal (4 deployments total) chemical state of the marine boundary layer, troposphere and lower stratosphere along meridional transects from the Arctic to the Antarctic of the Pacific and Atlantic Ocean Basins. This global-scale near-continuous vertical profiling of the remote atmosphere provides a unique dataset to characterize the distribution of key atmospheric species distribution in areas located far from emission sources. Here, we present the spatial (Pacific, Atlantic, Arctic) and temporal (winter, summer, fall, and spring) variability of O3 distribution as measured on ATom 1-4 campaigns. We compare these results with previous measurements from various NASA and NOAA airborne missions, and with long-term IAGOS (In-serving Aircraft for a Global Observing System) and SHADOZ (Shoutern Hemisphere Additional OZonesondes) ozonesonde vertical profiles at key locations to show the potential use of airborne data sets in establishing an in situ, observation-based, O3 climatology.- Publication:
-
AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2018
- Bibcode:
- 2018AGUFM.A31I2954B
- Keywords:
-
- 0340 Middle atmosphere: composition and chemistry;
- ATMOSPHERIC COMPOSITION AND STRUCTUREDE: 0345 Pollution: urban and regional;
- ATMOSPHERIC COMPOSITION AND STRUCTUREDE: 0365 Troposphere: composition and chemistry;
- ATMOSPHERIC COMPOSITION AND STRUCTUREDE: 0394 Instruments and techniques;
- ATMOSPHERIC COMPOSITION AND STRUCTURE