Assimilation of ozone profiles and total column measurements into a global general circulation model

Abstract

Ozone profiles from the Microwave Limb Sounder (MLS) instrument flown on board the Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite (UARS) and total ozone columns measured by the Global Ozone Monitoring Experiment (GOME) on board the Second European Remote Sensing Satellite (ERS‐2) have been assimilated using a troposphere‐stratosphere data assimilation system. The analysis system is based on the global analysis system used for operational analysis of the stratosphere at the Meteorological Office from 1991 to 2000. Three assimilation runs have been completed for a three‐week period in April 1997 to test the advantage of using a combination of MLS and GOME observations, compared with the assimilation of each observation data set separately. The statistical information produced by the assimilation system shows that the combination of MLS and GOME observations via the assimilation process produces ozone fields that show improvement compared with analysis fields produced by the assimilation of either MLS or GOME separately. Comparison of the analyzed ozone fields with independent observations (ozonesondes, Halogen Occultation Experiment (HALOE) profiles and Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer (TOMS) total ozone column measurements) corroborates these results and shows that the combined MLS and GOME ozone analyses provide a realistic representation of the atmospheric ozone distribution. The global root‐mean‐square residual (difference between the analyses and independent observations) against HALOE and TOMS observations is comparable to the quoted errors in the HALOE and TOMS instruments (5% in each case).