Subseasonal variability of water vapor in the upper stratosphere/lower mesosphere over Northern Europe in winter 2009/2010

Abstract

For the upper stratosphere and lower mesosphere (USLM) we used microwave spectrometer measurements of water vapor to investigate the cause of subseasonal variability over Northern Europe: at ALOMAR (Andenes, 69.3° N, 16.1° E), Northern Norway, and at the Leibniz Institute of Atmospheric Physics (Kühlungsborn, 54.2° N, 11.8° E), Northern Germany, for winter 2009/2010. The MERRA data set of NASA is applied to study the dynamical link between the local variability of H2O and transport in the USLM.Besides a slow increase in January and a stronger decrease in February and March 2010, episodes of significant increase and decrease of H2O were found over Northern Germany. These structural changes are in good agreement with MERRA which show similar patterns induced by a dominant conservative horizontal transport of H2O. Due to the strong negative meridional gradient and mixing barrier, higher values of water vapor have been observed outside the polar vortex and lower values inside. We found that the complex polar vortex evolution over Northern Germany during the minor stratospheric sudden warming (mSSW) in the beginning of December 2009 and the major warming (MSSW) at the end of January 2010, as well as between the two, fits well into this relationship. An episode of strong increase in water vapor over ALOMAR at about 55–60km altitude was observed during the MSSW on the 27th of January 2010 resulting in a significant double peak in altitude. Based on MERRA data we show that this dual peak was caused by a relatively strong regional northward propagation of more moist air in the lower mesosphere. In the lower mesosphere strong polar intrusion of warm and moist air occurred mainly over Northern Europe resulting in a well-mixed polar anticyclone on the 30th of January. In comparison with observations the local maxima of H2O in MERRA are underestimated by approximately 1–2ppmv. After the MSSW, the vertical descent rate of the MERRA reanalysis is half as much as the observed one over Kühlungsborn.Nevertheless the high coherence between local water vapor measurements over Northern Germany and Northern Norway and MERRA supports the extended use of MERRA for subseasonal transport studies in the USLM. We conclude that the observed strong subseasonal variability of H2O in the USLM over Northern Europe, especially over Kühlungsborn and over ALOMAR, during the winter 2009/2010 was caused by the passage of the edge of polar vortex and linked transport of H2O.