Validation of Global Ozone Monitoring Experiment ozone profiles and evaluation of stratospheric transport in a global chemistry transport model

Abstract

This paper presents a validation of Global Ozone Monitoring Experiment (GOME) ozone (O3) profiles which are used to evaluate stratospheric transport in the chemistry transport model (CTM) Tracer Model version 5 (TM5) using a linearized stratospheric O3 chemistry scheme. A comparison of GOME O3 profile measurements with independent O3 sonde measurements at midlatitudes shows an excellent agreement. Differences are smaller than 5%, well within the uncertainty of the O3 sonde measurements. Within the tropics, the GOME O3 profile differences are larger, with a clear lower stratospheric negative O3 bias with compensating positive biases in the troposphere and higher stratosphere. The TM5 model with linearized O3 chemistry simulates realistic lower and middle stratospheric spatial and temporal O3 variations on both short (daily) and long (seasonal) timescales. Model stratospheric O3 is significantly overestimated in the extratropics and slightly underestimated in the tropics, as is also shown in a comparison with Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer total O3 column measurements. This model bias predominantly occurs in the lower stratosphere and is present throughout the year, albeit with seasonal variations: The bias is larger during local winter compared with local summer. The particular spatial and seasonal variations of the model bias suggest a too fast meridional stratospheric transport in TM5, which agrees with earlier found shortcomings of using winds from data assimilation systems. The model results are very sensitive to the data assimilation method in the numerical weather prediction that provides the model wind fields. A large reduction (up to 50% of the bias) in modeled lower stratospheric midlatitude O3 was found when winds from four‐dimensional instead of three‐dimensional data assimilation were used. Previous work has shown that using different forecast periods was important for improving the age of air. Model results differed with different forecast periods (up to 3 days), although the effect was mainly confined to high‐latitude lower stratospheric O3. Apparently, using different forecast periods is more important for age‐of‐air calculations than for stratospheric O3 calculations. A positive bias in the extratropical lower stratosphere of about 20% remained, possibly related to the lack of heterogeneous polar stratospheric O3 destruction in TM5.