Harmonized Dataset of Ozone Profiles from Satellite Limb and Occultation Measurements

In this paper, we present a HARMonized dataset of OZone profiles (HARMOZ) based on limb and occultation measurements from Envisat (GOMOS, MIPAS and SCIAMACHY), Odin (OSIRIS, SMR) and SCISAT (ACE-FTS) satellite instruments. These measurements provide high-vertical-resolution ozone profiles covering the altitude range from the upper troposphere up to the mesosphere in years 2001-2012. HARMOZ has been created in the framework of the European Space Agency Climate Change Initiative project. The harmonized dataset consists of original retrieved ozone profiles from each instrument, which are screened for invalid data by the instrument teams. While the original ozone profiles are presented in different units and on different vertical grids, the harmonized dataset is given on a common pressure grid in netCDF (network common data form)-4 format. The pressure grid corresponds to vertical sampling of similar to 1 km below 20 km and 2-3 km above 20 km. The vertical range of the ozone profiles is specific for each instrument, thus all information contained in the original data is preserved. Provided altitude and temperature profiles allow the representation of ozone profiles in number density or mixing ratio on a pressure or altitude vertical grid. Geolocation, uncertainty estimates and vertical resolution are provided for each profile. For each instrument, optional parameters, which are related to the data quality, are also included. For convenience of users, tables of biases between each pair of instruments for each month, as well as bias uncertainties, are provided. These tables characterize the data consistency and can be used in various bias and drift analyses, which are needed, for instance, for combining several datasets to obtain a long-term climate dataset. This user-friendly dataset can be interesting and useful for various analyses and applications, such as data merging, data validation, assimilation and scientific research. The dataset is available at http://www.esa-ozone-cci.org/?q=node/161 or at doi: 10.5270/esa-ozone_cci-limb_occultation_profiles-2001_2012-v_1-201308

Positive youth development in swimming: clarification and consensus of key psychosocial assets

The purpose of this study was to gain a more cohesive understanding of the assets considered necessary to develop in young swimmers to ensure both individual and sport specific development. This two stage study involved (a) a content analysis of key papers to develop a list of both psychosocial skills for performance enhancement and assets associated with positive youth development, and (b) in-depth interviews involving ten expert swim coaches, practitioners and youth sport scholars. Five higher order categories containing seventeen individual assets emerged. These results are discussed in relation to both existing models of positive youth development and implications for coaches, practitioners and parents when considering the psychosocial development of young British swimmers

A global climatology of the mesospheric sodium layerfrom GOMOS data during the 2002-2008 period

This paper presents a climatology of the mesospheric sodium layer built from the processing of 7 years of GOMOS data. With respect to preliminary results already published for the year 2003, a more careful analysis was applied to the averaging of occultations inside the climatological bins (10° in latitude-1 month). Also, the slant path absorption lines of the Na doublet around 589 nm shows evidence of partial saturation that was responsible for an underestimation of the Na concentration in our previous results. The sodium climatology has been validated with respect to the Fort Collins lidar measurements and, to a lesser extent, to the OSIRIS 2003–2004 data. Despite the important natural sodium variability, we have shown that the Na vertical column has a marked semi-annual oscillation at low latitudes that merges into an annual oscillation in the polar regions, a spatial distribution pattern that was unreported so far. The sodium layer seems to be clearly influenced by the mesospheric global circulation and the altitude of the layer shows clear signs of subsidence during polar winter. The climatology has been parameterized by time-latitude robust fits to allow for easy use. Taking into account the non-linearity of the transmittance due to partial saturation, an experimental approach is proposed to derive mesospheric temperatures from limb remote sounding measurements

Merged SAGE II, Ozone_cci and OMPS ozone profile dataset and evaluation of ozone trends in the stratosphere

In this paper, we present a merged dataset of ozone profiles from several satellite instruments: SAGE II on ERBS, GOMOS, SCIAMACHY and MIPAS on Envisat, OSIRIS on Odin, ACE-FTS on SCISAT, and OMPS on Suomi-NPP. The merged dataset is created in the framework of the European Space Agency Climate Change Initiative (Ozone_cci) with the aim of analyzing stratospheric ozone trends. For the merged dataset, we used the latest versions of the original ozone datasets. The datasets from the individual instruments have been extensively validated and intercompared; only those datasets which are in good agreement, and do not exhibit significant drifts with respect to collocated ground-based observations and with respect to each other, are used for merging. The long-term SAGE–CCI–OMPS dataset is created by computation and merging of deseasonalized anomalies from individual instruments. The merged SAGE–CCI–OMPS dataset consists of deseasonalized anomalies of ozone in 10° latitude bands from 90° S to 90° N and from 10 to 50 km in steps of 1 km covering the period from October 1984 to July 2016. This newly created dataset is used for evaluating ozone trends in the stratosphere through multiple linear regression. Negative ozone trends in the upper stratosphere are observed before 1997 and positive trends are found after 1997. The upper stratospheric trends are statistically significant at midlatitudes and indicate ozone recovery, as expected from the decrease of stratospheric halogens that started in the middle of the 1990s and stratospheric cooling

Relative drifts and biases between six ozone limb satellite measurements from the last decade

As part of European Space Agency’s (ESA) climate change initiative, high vertical resolution ozone profiles from three instruments all aboard ESA’s Envisat (GOMOS, MIPAS, SCIAMACHY) and ESA’s third party missions (OSIRIS, SMR, ACE-FTS) are to be combined in order to create an essential climate variable data record for the last decade. A prerequisite before combining data is the examination of differences and drifts between the data sets. In this paper, we present a detailed analysis of ozone profile differences based on pairwise collocated measurements, including the evolution of the differences with time. Such a diagnosis is helpful to identify strengths and weaknesses of each data set that may vary in time and introduce uncertainties in long-term trend estimates. The analysis reveals that the relative drift between the sensors is not statistically significant for most pairs of instruments. The relative drift values can be used to estimate the added uncertainty in physical trends. The added drift uncertainty is estimated at about 3% decade$^{-1}$ (1σ). Larger differences and variability in the differences are found in the lowermost stratosphere (below 20 km) and in the mesosphere

Relative drifts and biases between six ozone limb satellite measurements from the last decade

As part of European Space Agency’s (ESA) climate change initiative, high vertical resolution ozone profiles from three instruments all aboard ESA’s Envisat (GOMOS, MIPAS, SCIAMACHY) and ESA’s third party missions (OSIRIS, SMR, ACE-FTS) are to be combined in order to create an essential climate variable data record for the last decade. A prerequisite before combining data is the examination of differences and drifts between the data sets. In this paper, we present a detailed analysis of ozone profile differences based on pairwise collocated measurements, including the evolution of the differences with time. Such a diagnosis is helpful to identify strengths and weaknesses of each data set that may vary in time and introduce uncertainties in long-term trend estimates. The analysis reveals that the relative drift between the sensors is not statistically significant for most pairs of instruments. The relative drift values can be used to estimate the added uncertainty in physical trends. The added drift uncertainty is estimated at about 3% decade$^{-1}$ (1σ). Larger differences and variability in the differences are found in the lowermost stratosphere (below 20 km) and in the mesosphere

Relative Drifts and Biases Between Six Ozone Limb Satellite Measurements From the Last Decade

As part of European Space Agency\u27s (ESA) climate change initiative, high vertical resolution ozone profiles from three instruments all aboard ESA\u27s Envisat (GOMOS, MIPAS, SCIAMACHY) and ESA\u27s third party missions (OSIRIS, SMR, ACE-FTS) are to be combined in order to create an essential climate variable data record for the last decade. A prerequisite before combining data is the examination of differences and drifts between the data sets. In this paper, we present a detailed analysis of ozone profile differences based on pairwise collocated measurements, including the evolution of the differences with time. Such a diagnosis is helpful to identify strengths and weaknesses of each data set that may vary in time and introduce uncertainties in long-term trend estimates. The analysis reveals that the relative drift between the sensors is not statistically significant for most pairs of instruments. The relative drift values can be used to estimate the added uncertainty in physical trends. The added drift uncertainty is estimated at about 3% decade-1 (1σ). Larger differences and variability in the differences are found in the lowermost stratosphere (below 20 km) and in the mesosphere

Validation of the TROPOspheric Monitoring Instrument (TROPOMI) surface UV radiation product

The TROPOspheric Monitoring Instrument (TROPOMI) onboard the Sentinel-5 Precursor (S5P) satellite was launched on 13 October 2017 to provide the atmospheric composition for atmosphere and climate research. The S5P is a Sun-synchronous polar-orbiting satellite providing global daily coverage. The TROPOMI swath is 2600 km wide, and the ground resolution for most data products is 7:23:5 km2 (5:63:5 km2 since 6 August 2019) at nadir. The Finnish Meteorological Institute (FMI) is responsible for the development of the TROPOMI UV algorithm and the processing of the TROPOMI surface ultraviolet (UV) radiation product which includes 36 UV parameters in total. Ground-based data from 25 sites located in arctic, subarctic, temperate, equatorial and Antarctic areas were used for validation of the TROPOMI overpass irradiance at 305, 310, 324 and 380 nm, overpass erythemally weighted dose rate/UV index, and erythemally weighted daily dose for the period from 1 January 2018 to 31 August 2019. The validation results showed that for most sites 60 % 80% of TROPOMI data was within 20% of ground-based data for snow-free surface conditions. The median relative differences to ground-based measurements of TROPOMI snow-free surface daily doses were within 10% and 5% at two-Thirds and at half of the sites, respectively. At several sites more than 90% of cloud-free TROPOMI data was within 20% of groundbased measurements. Generally median relative differences between TROPOMI data and ground-based measurements were a little biased towards negative values (i.e. satellite data ground-based measurement), but at high latitudes where non-homogeneous topography and albedo or snow conditions occurred, the negative bias was exceptionally high: from 30% to 65 %. Positive biases of 10 % 15% were also found for mountainous sites due to challenging topography. The TROPOMI surface UV radiation product includes quality flags to detect increased uncertainties in the data due to heterogeneous surface albedo and rough terrain, which can be used to filter the data retrieved under challenging conditions