West-Antarctic Total Ozone Variation Related to the Regional Meteorology

In this study, the variation of west-Antarctic total ozone column (TOC) was investigated in terms of the relationship to the regional meteorology. For this analysis, satellite TOC measurements (from the monitoring of Ozone Monitoring Instrument) were mainly utilized with the validation with the ground-based TOC measurements (from the Dobson and Brewer instrument). We confirmed that these remote sensing techniques well captured the recent recovery pattern of TOC in austral spring, similar to the previous findings based on the ozonesonde measurement. Here we more focused on the large year-to-year variation, implying the possible change of regional air conditions, which can also affect to the polar ozone chemistry. Thus, we performed the correlation analysis between TOC and meteorological factors (temperature, potential vorticity, and wind speed) provided from the reanalysis dataset (ERA-Interim). Our results indicated that these correlations have huge differences temporally (i.e., monthly scale) and spatially (i.e., vertical scale). In west Antarctica, TOC correlates with the air temperature negatively in the lower and middle stratosphere, but positively in the upper stratosphere. Also, TOC correlates with the potential vorticity positively in the lower and middle stratosphere, but negatively near the tropopause, particularly in austral summer. Our detail interpretation supposed that the spatiotemporal pattern of west-Antarctic TOC is attributed to the vertically different dominance of atmospheric processes such as the polar vortex intensification, temperature dependence of the Chapman mechanism, and stratosphere-troposphere exchange. Further study should be required for better understanding of this correlation.