Investigating troposhpere-stratosphere coupling during the southern hemisphere sudden stratospheric warming using an adjoint model.

Abstract:

In September 2002 a major sudden stratospheric warming (SSW) occurred in the southern hemisphere. Although numerous SSWs have been observed in the northern hemisphere, this remains the only recorded major SSW in the southern hemisphere. Much debate has focused on this unique event and the causes, even resulting in a special issue of the Journal of Atmospheric Science. In this work we use the adjoint of NASA's Goddard Earth Observing System version 5 (GEOS-5) to investigate sensitivity to initial conditions during the onset of the 2002 SSW. The adjoint model provides a framework for propagating gradients with respect to the model state backwards in time. As such it is used to reveal aspects of the model initial conditions that have the biggest impact on the temperature in the stratosphere during the warming. The adjoint model reveals a large sensitivity over the southern Atlantic ocean and in the troposphere. This reinforces previous studies that attributed the SSW to a blocking ridge in this region. By converting sensitivity to perturbations it is shown that relatively small localized tropospheric perturbations to winds and temperature can be transported to the stratosphere and have a large impact on the SSW.