High-resolution tropospheric ozone fields for INTEX and ARCTAS from IONS ozonesondes

Abstract

The IONS-04, IONS-06, and ARC-IONS ozone sounding campaigns over North America in 2004, 2006, and 2008 obtained approximately 1400 profiles, in five series of coordinated and closely spaced (typically daily) launches. Although this coverage is unprecedented, it is still somewhat sparse in its geographical spacing. Here we use forward and back trajectory calculations for each sounding to map ozone measurements to a number of other locations and so to fill in the spatial domain. This is possible because the lifetime of ozone in the troposphere is of the order of weeks. The trajectory-mapped ozone values show reasonable agreement, where they overlap, to the actual soundings, and the patterns produced separately by forward and backward trajectory calculations are similar. Comparisons with MOZAIC profiles and surface station data show generally good agreement. A variable-length smoothing algorithm is used to fill data gaps: for each point on the map, the smoothing radius is such that a minimum of 10 data points are included in the average. The total tropospheric ozone column maps calculated by integrating the smoothed fields agree well with similar maps derived from TOMS and OMI/MLS measurements. The resulting three-dimensional picture of the tropospheric ozone field for the INTEX and ARCTAS periods facilitates visualization and comparison of different years and seasons and will be useful to other researchers.