Abstract
Abstract. An ozone mini-hole is a synoptic-scale area of strongly reduced column total ozone, which undergoes a growth-decay cycle in association with baroclinic weather systems. The tracks of mini-hole events recorded during the TOMS observation period over the Northern Hemisphere provide a database for building anomaly fields of various meteorological parameters, following each mini-hole center in a Lagrangian sense. The resulting fields provide, for the first time, a complete mean Lagrangian picture of the three-dimensional structure of typical ozone mini-holes in the Northern Hemisphere. Mini-holes are shown to be associated with anomalous warm anticyclonic flow in the upper troposphere and cold cyclonic anomalies in the middle stratosphere. Ascending air columns occur upstream and descent downstream of the mini-hole centers. Band-pass filtering is used to reveal the transient synoptic nature of mini-holes embedded within larger scale circulation anomalies. Significant correlations between ozone and Ertel’s potential vorticity on isentropes (IPV) both near the tropopause and in the middle stratosphere are shown and then utilized by reconstructing the Lagrangian analysis to follow local IPV anomalies instead of ozone minima. By using IPV as a proxy for ozone, the geopotential anomaly dipolar structure in the vertical characteristic of mini-holes is shown to result from a superposition of two largely independent dynamical components, stratospheric and tropospheric, typically operating on different time scales. Hence, ozone mini-holes may be viewed primarily as phenomena of coincidence.Key words. Meteorology and atmospheric dynamics (middle atmosphere dynamics; synoptic-scale meteorology)
Highlights
Ever since the pioneering work of Dobson et al (1929), the variability of column total ozone levels and its association with the passage of weather systems has been a subject of fascinating study. Reed (1950) investigated cases where locally strong ozone decrease occurred, and showed that these synoptic-scale regions lasted typically only a few days
Local relative vorticity anomalies show strong positive correlations with total ozone (Vaughan and Price, 1991). This was utilized by Peters et al (1995), who showed that the dynamics of vorticity and isentropic potential vorticity (IPV) development could be used as a proxy for ozone mini-holes
Mini-holes are shown to form in transient waves running over tropospheric anticyclonic ridges, with rising warm air masses on their western flanks and descent to the east, underneath a quasi-stationary region of anomalously cold stratosphere on the cyclonic flanks of the polar vortex
Summary
Ever since the pioneering work of Dobson et al (1929), the variability of column total ozone levels and its association. Local relative vorticity anomalies show strong positive correlations with total ozone (Vaughan and Price, 1991). This was utilized by Peters et al (1995), who showed that the dynamics of vorticity and isentropic potential vorticity (IPV) development could be used as a proxy for ozone mini-holes. Aspects of the vertical structure of ozone minima have recently been studied by Reid et al (2000), who showed, for example, that backward trajectories ending at ozone minima over Europe typically have very different source latitudes depending on the isentropic level at the end: minima near the tropopause height typically have trajectories out of the sub-tropics, whereas lower stratospheric minima have trajectories coming from further polewards.
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