Reconciliation of essential process parameters for an enhanced predictability of Arctic stratospheric ozone loss and its climate interactions (RECONCILE): activities and results

Year: 2013

Authors: von Hobe M., Bekki S., Borrmann S., Cairo F., D’Amato F., Di Donfrancesco G., Dörnbrack A., Ebersoldt A., Ebert M., Emde C., Engel I., Ern M., Frey W. Genco, S., Griessbach S., Grooß J.-U., Gulde T., Günther G., Hösen E., Hoffmann L., Homonnai V., Hoyle C.R., Isaksen I.S.A., Jackson D.R., Jánosi I.M., Jones R.L., Kandler K., Kalicinsky C., Keil A., Khaykin S.M., Khosrawi F., Kivi R., Kuttippurath J., Laube J.C., Lefèvre F., Lehmann R., Ludmann S., Luo B.P., Marchand M., Meyer J., Mitev V., Molleker S., Müller R., Oelhaf H., Olschewski F., Orsolini Y., Peter T., Pfeilsticker K., Piesch C., Pitts M.C., Poole L.R., Pope F.D., Ravegnani F., Rex M., Riese M., Röckmann T., Rognerud B., Roiger A., Rolf C., Santee M.L., Scheibe M., Schiller C., Schlager H., Siciliani de Cumis M., Sitnikov N., Søvde O.A., Spang R., Spelten N., Stordal F., Suminska-Ebersoldt O., Ulanovski A., Ungermann J., Viciani S., Volk C.M., vom Scheidt M., von der Gathen P., Walker K., Wegner T., Weigel R., Weinbruch S., Wetzel G., Wienhold F.G., Wohltmann I., Woiwode W., Young I.A.K., Yushkov V., Zobrist B., Stroh F.

Autors Affiliation: Forschungszentrum Jülich GmbH, Institute of Energy and Climate Research (IEK-7), Jülich, Germany;
LATMOS-IPSL, UPMC Univ. Paris 06, Université Versailles St.-Quentin, CNRS/INSU, Paris, France;
Max Planck Institute for Chemistry, Particle Chemistry Department, Mainz, Germany;
Institute of Atmospheric Science and Climate, ISAC-CNR;
CNR-INO (Istituto Nazionale di Ottica) Largo E. Fermi 6, 50125 Firenze, Italy;
Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt (DLR), Institut für Physik der Atmosphäre, Oberpfaffenhofen, 82234 Weßling, Germany;
Institute for Data Processing and Electronics, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Karlsruhe, Germany;
Technische Universität Darmstadt, Institut für Angewandte Geowissenschaften, Umweltmineralogie, Darmstadt, Germany;
Meteorologisches Institut, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, München, Germany;
ETH Zurich, Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science, Zurich, Switzerland;
Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC), Forschungszentrum Jülich GmbH, Jülich, Germany;
Institute for Meteorology and Climate Research, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Karlsruhe, Germany;
Department of Physics, University of Wuppertal, Germany;
Department of Physics of Complex Systems, Eötvös Loránd University, Pázmány P. s. 1/A, 1117 Budapest, Hungary;
Department of Geosciences, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway;
Met Office, Exeter, UK;
University of Cambridge, Department of Chemistry, Cambridge, UK;
Institute for Atmospheric and Environmental Sciences, Goethe University Frankfurt, Frankfurt, Germany;
Central Aerological Observatory, Dolgoprudny, Moskow Region, Russia;
MISU, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden;
Finnish Meteorological Institute, Arctic Research, Sodankylä, Finland;
University of East Anglia, School of Environmental Sciences, Norwich, UK;
Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research, Potsdam, Germany;
Institut für Umweltphysik, University of Heidelberg, Germany;
CSEM Centre Suisse d’Electronique et de Microtechnique SA, Neuchâtel, Switzerland;
Norwegian Institute for Air Research, Kjeller, Norway;
NASA Langley Research Center, Hampton, VA 23681, USA;
Science Systems and Applications, Inc. Hampton, VA 23666, USA;
Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Research Utrecht (IMAU), Utrecht University, Utrecht, the Netherlands;
JPL/NASA, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California, USA;
Department of Physics, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada;
ENEA Roma Italy

Abstract: The international research project RECONCILE has addressed central questions regarding polar ozone depletion, with the objective to quantify some of the most relevant yet still uncertain physical and chemical processes and thereby improve prognostic modelling capabilities to realistically predict the response of the ozone layer to climate change. This overview paper outlines the scope and the general approach of RECONCILE, and it provides a summary of observations and modelling in 2010 and 2011 that have generated an in many respects unprecedented dataset to study processes in the Arctic winter stratosphere. Principally, it summarises important outcomes of RECONCILE including (i) better constraints and enhanced consistency on the set of parameters governing catalytic ozone destruction cycles, (ii) a better understanding of the role of cold binary aerosols in heterogeneous chlorine activation, (iii) an improved scheme of polar stratospheric cloud (PSC) processes that includes heterogeneous nucleation of nitric acid trihydrate (NAT) and ice on non-volatile background aerosol leading to better model parameterisations with respect to denitrification, and (iv) long transient simulations with a chemistryclimate model (CCM) updated based on the results of RECONCILE that better reproduce past ozone trends in Antarctica and are deemed to produce more reliable predictions of future ozone trends. The process studies and the global simulations conducted in RECONCILE show that in the Arctic, ozone depletion uncertainties in the chemical and microphysical processes are now clearly smaller than the sensitivity to dynamic variability.

Journal/Review:

Volume: 13 (18)      Pages from: 9233  to: 9268

More Information: RECONCILE is funded by the European Commission under the grant number RECONCILE-226365-FP7-ENV-2008-1. This funding enabled the scientific findings described in this paper, and is greatly appreciated. We are also grateful to the EC scientific officers Claus Bruning and Franz Immler for their support. We also acknowledge important contributions from institutional funding, and thank the involved scientists and administrative and technical stuff at the partner institutions who supported the project work in many ways. We thank MDB and in particular the M55-Geophysica pilots Oleg Shepetkov and Oleg Kononenko and the ground crew led by G. Belyaev for their fantastic work during the aircraft campaign. For invaluable support with logistics, flight permissions, and many other aspects of the aircraft campaign, we thank Rolf Maser and Harald Franke from ENVISCOPE, Heinz Finkenzeller from FINKCAS, Kurt Maki and the Kiruna airport crew, and the Longyearbyen airport crew. Support for M. C. Pitts is provided under the auspices of the NASA CALIPSO/CloudSat Science Team. Support for L. R. Poole is provided under NASA contract NNL11AA10D. Work at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, was done under contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The Atmospheric Chemistry Experiment (ACE), also known as SCISAT, is a Canadian-led mission mainly supported by the Canadian Space Agency. Work at the University of East Anglia was made possible through funding from the UK Natural Environment Research Council (research fellowships NE/F015585/1 & NE/I021918/1). The atmospheric sounding campaign at FMI Sodankyla was supported by the EU through the Lapland Atmosphere-Biosphere Facility (LAPBIAT2) project. The Geophysica flight on 10 March 2010 was funded by the ESA under the PremierEx project. The PremierEx project also funded two Geophysica flights in autumn 2009 from Oberpfaffenhofen, Germany, that provided an invaluable opportunity for instrument testing prior to the Kiruna activities. We thank Bodeker Scientific for the total column ozone data and ECMWF for providing forecast, analysis and reanalysis data. Some of these data were available through the special project \”Effect of non-hydrostatic gravity waves on the stratosphere above Scandinavia\” by one of the authors (A. D.). Finally, we thank Susan Solomon, Jean-Pierre Pommereau, Rob MacKenzie, and Ross Salawitch for constructive reviews and valuable comments that helped to improve the manuscript and greatly enhanced the value of this paper.
KeyWords: aerosol; atmospheric chemistry; climate modeling; ozone; ozone depletion; parameterization; prediction; sensitivity analysis; stratosphere, Arctic
DOI: 10.5194/acp-13-9233-2013

Citations: 61
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