Wesley A. Traub

Ozone measurements from the Balloon Intercomparison Campaign

Measurements of the Balloon Intercomparison Campaign (BIC), conducted during fall, 1982 (BIC-1) and summer, 1983 (BIC-2), are reported. Results of five remote and two in situ techniques agree (with a few exceptions) within 95% confidence level uncertainties and generally within 15% above 20 km. Weighted mean profiles, which best represent conditions during the capaign, are used as a comparison standard. Accuracies of experiments indicated by BIC generally confirm estimated uncertainites for ECC sondes, UV photometry, and microwave emission experiments, are somewhat better for far IR emission and IR absorption experiments, and are somewhat worse for IR emission and solar UV absorption experiments. The large collection of BIC measurements confirms a problem reported earlier with current theoretical modeling of ozone near 40 km where transport is negligible and the chemistry is believed to be simpler.

Chemical change in the arctic vortex during AASE II

We measured column abundances of HF, HCl, O3, HNO3, and H2O on the NASA DC-8 during the AASE II campaign, using thermal emission spectroscopy. We made multiple traversals of the Arctic vortex and surroundings. Using HF as a tracer, we remove the effects of subsidence from the measured column abundances; perturbations in the resulting column abundances are attributed to chemical processing. We find that by January 1992 the stratospheric column in the vortex had been chemically depleted by about (55±10)% in HCl and (35±10)% in O3, and enhanced by about (15±10)% in HNO3 and (0±10)% in H2O.