A Stratospheric Consensus Ozone Database for Long-Term Climate Simulations

There is increasing evidence that the stratosphere exerts control on tropospheric climate. For example, changes in the Southern Annular Mode (SAM) and Northern Annular Mode (NAM) are thought to be influenced by stratospheric ozone depletion in recent decades. General Circulation Models (GCM) that do not include chemistry must prescribe accurate stratospheric ozone distributions in order to capture these effects. Therefore, a new consensus ozone database has been created to provide the best possible input for climate models using many observational ozone datasets, including, but not limited to, SAGE, SBUV, HALOE, and ozonesondes. Five databases were originally created and compared before merging into a master database. Strengths and weaknesses of these original databases will be outlined. The master database includes several versions (tiers) that have increasing levels of interannual variations represented, from tier 1 which only includes interdecadal changes to tier 3 which includes the observed interannual changes to high fidelity. The availability of three tiers will allow modelers to select a dataset that best fits their simulation. Details of the database construction and its improvements over earlier databases will be discussed.