A43E-0331
First look at the NOAA Aircraft-based Tropospheric Ozone Climatology
Thursday, 17 December 2015
Poster Hall (Moscone South)
Irina V Petropavlovskikh1,2, Mark Leonard3, Audra McClure-Begley1,2, Meiyun Lin4, David Tarasick5, Bryan J Johnson2 and Samuel J Oltmans1,6, (1)Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, Boulder, CO, United States, (2)NOAA Boulder, ESRL/GMD, Boulder, CO, United States, (3)Science and Technology Corporation, Boulder, CO, United States, (4)Princeton University, Program in Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, Princeton, NJ, United States, (5)Environment Canada Toronto, Downsview, ON, Canada, (6)NOAA Boulder, Earth System Research Laboratory, Global Monitoring Division, Boulder, CO, United States
Abstract:
The Global Greenhouse Gas Reference Network’s aircraft program has operated since the 1990s as part of the NOAA Global Monitoring Division network to capture spatial and temporal variability in greenhouse tracers (i.e. CO2, CO, N2O, methane, SF6, halo- and hydro-carbons). Since 2005 the suite of airborne measurements also includes ozone, humidity and temperature profiling through the troposphere (up to 8 km). Light commercial aircraft are equipped with modified 2B Technology ozone monitors (Model 205DB), incorporate temperature and humidity probes, and include global positioning system instrumentation. The dataset was analyzed for tropospheric ozone variability at five continental US stations. As site locations within the Tropospheric Aircraft Ozone Measurement Program have flights only once (four times at one site) a month and begun a decade ago, this raises the question of whether this sampling frequency allows the derivation of an accurate vertical climatology of ozone values. We interpret the representativeness of the vertical and seasonal ozone distribution from aircraft measurements using multi-decadal hindcast simulations conducted with the GFDL AM3 chemistry-climate model. When available, climatology derived from co-located ozone-sonde data will be used for comparisons. The results of the comparisons are analyzed to establish altitude ranges in the troposphere where the aircraft climatology would be deemed to be the most representative. Aircraft-based climatologies are tested from two approaches: comparing the aircraft-based climatology to the daily sampled model and to the subset of model data with matching aircraft dates. Whenever the model and aircraft climatologies show significant seasonal differences, further information is gathered from a seasonal Gaussian distribution plot. We will report on the minimum frequency in flights that can provide adequate climatological representation of seasonal and vertical variability in tropospheric ozone.
