Abstract
Abstract. The total column ozone (TCO3) measurements by the Dobson spectrophotometer (serial no. 84) have been carried out at Belsk station (51∘50′ N, 20∘47′ E), Poland, since 23 March 1963. In total, ∼115 000 intraday manual observations were made by 31 December 2019. These observations were performed for different combinations of double wavelength pairs in the ultraviolet range and observation types, i.e., direct sun (DS), zenith blue (ZB), and zenith cloudy (ZC) depending on weather conditions. The long-term stability of the instrument was supported by frequent (almost every 4 years) intercomparisons with the world standard spectrophotometer. Trend analyses, based on the monthly and yearly averaged TCO3, can be carried out without any additional corrections to the intraday values. To adjust these data to the Brewer spectrophotometer observations, which were also performed at Belsk, a procedure is proposed to account for less accurate Dobson observations under low solar elevation, presence of clouds, and the temperature dependence of ozone absorption. The adjusted time series shows that the Brewer–Dobson monthly averaged differences are in the range of about ±0.5 %. The intraday TCO3 database, divided into three periods (1963–1979, 1980–1999, and 2000–2019), is freely available at https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.919378 (Rajewska-Więch et al., 2020).
Highlights
The monitoring of total column ozone (TCO3) started in 1924 in Oxford with a prototype of the Dobson instrument (DI)
The differences are derived from the monthly averaging of the daily mean TCO3 values for the following subsets: direct sun (DS)–AD, DS–CD, zenith blue (ZB), zenith sky (ZS), and for less reliable ZS observations, when the zenith was obscured by clouds, i.e., the so-called zenith cloudy (ZC) observations
Original TCO3 values from DS–AD observations presented by Dziewulska-Łosiowa et al (1983), which were based on the Vigroux O3AC, are converted to the values obtained using the Bass–Paur O3AC and compared with the corresponding values obtained from the current retrieval based on the Bass–Paur O3AC and R–N tables obtained in the last intercomparison in 2014
Summary
The monitoring of total column ozone (TCO3) started in 1924 in Oxford (the United Kingdom) with a prototype of the Dobson instrument (DI). There were several attempts to recalculate the O3AC (Redondas et al, 2014), and the recalculation proposed by Serdyuchenko et al (2014) was recommended for the ground-based TCO3 network The application of these temperature-dependent absorption coefficients significantly reduced the artificial seasonality in the Dobson–Brewer differences to less than 1 % (Redondas et al, 2014; Fragkos et al, 2015). Severe chemical losses occurred in the Arctic stratosphere in spring 2020 (e.g., Manney et al, 2020; Wohltmann et al, 2020) It is still worth monitoring ozone with the Dobson spectrophotometer, which was designed and put into operation almost 100 years ago. This paper presents further steps in the homogenization of Belsk’s TCO3 time series for the period 1963–2019 in the perspective of the long-term variability in the atmospheric ozone and possibility of replacing Belsk’s Dobson with a modern Brewer spectrophotometer
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