Vertical Structures of Temperature and Ozone Changes in the Stratosphere and Mesosphere during Stratospheric Sudden Warmings

Abstract

We analyze the observations of temperature and ozone measured by Micro Limb Sounder onboard Aura satellite during the period from 2005 to 2016, in order to investigate the vertical structures of temperature and ozone in the stratosphere and mesosphere during stratospheric sudden warming (SSW). We compute the height profiles of the correlation coefficients between 55 height levels of MLS temperature anomalies and compare them with WACCM simulation for three major SSWs occurred in January 2006, 2009, and 2013. We also construct the temperature and ozone anomalies for three events to investigate the changes of temperature and ozone distributions with height. Our results show that there seems to be always a relatively weak but broad negative correlation between the temperature anomaly at 10 hPa and temperature anomalies over the entire mesosphere region during the period before SSWs. However, this pattern gets stronger in the lower mesosphere region but becomes positive correlation in the upper mesosphere and lower thermosphere regions after the onset of SSW. We also found that the result from WACCM temperatures show similar trend with the observational results but with smaller variation and the transition height from negative to positive correlation in mesosphere is much lower than the observation.