Please join us for an informal seminar sponsored by the Atomic and Molecular Physics Division, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. (Complete schedule at http://www.cfa.harvard.edu/amp/events.html) 2:00 PM Thursday July 28, 2011 Phillips Auditorium 60 Garden St., Cambridge, MA 02138 Boundary layer and free tropospheric ozone spatio-temporal variability: UAH LIDAR measurements and model simulations Michael J. Newchurch University of Alabama in Huntsville Tropospheric ozone DIALs have measured laminar structure in atmospheric ozone distributions in a variety of locations and campaigns. These ozone laminae result from stratospheric intrusions, residual layer transport, synoptic circulations, and other mechanisms. Strong STE events are well modeled by regional CTM calculations. Free-tropospheric and nocturnal boundary layer laminae are frequently not well represented in regional models. Using measured ozone as initial and boundary conditions significantly improves model representation of mean vertical distributions, but profiles with sufficient vertical resolution to identify typical 1-km thick laminae are generally unavailable because current (and likely future) satellite observations lack the ability to vertically resolve these ozone laminae at sufficient resolution to capture the physical structure present in the atmosphere. Analysis of ozonesonde measurements indicates that the vertical correlation length above surface ozone extends no higher than the PBL. Satellite observations of free troposphereic ozone above the PBL provide very little information about PBL ozone amounts. A proposed solution is to populate the GALION aerosol-lidar network with additional ozone lidars to characterize the continental spatio-temporal evolution of ozone laminae. This idea involves both hardware technology advances and data assimilation techniques ingesting both ground-based and space-borne observations. _______________________________________________ Aspuru-meetings-list mailing list Aspuru-meetings-list(a)lists.fas.harvard.edu https://lists.fas.harvard.edu/mailman/listinfo/aspuru-meetings-list