Dynamical Variability of Ozone in The UTLS Region Based on Version 5 AIRS Data

Understanding the role of dynamics and chemistry in controlling the UTLS composition is a key element for predicting climate variability. In this work, we present an initial analysis of dynamical variability of ozone in the extratropical UTLS region using the newly available global satellite ozone data from Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) on EOS-Aqua platform. Initial validation analysis of AIRS version 4 ozone retrieval indicates that the ozone data in the tropopause region are highly consistent with the dynamical fields. The version 4 retrieval, however, is highly dependent on a retrieval a priori training data set, which is based on ECMWF model output. This dependency has been removed in the version 5 retrieval. In this work, we first show a validation analysis of the version 5 ozone data, and then further examine the large scale dynamical variability in the extratropical UT/LS region represented by the ozone data.