Composite Ozone Anomaly Patterns Generated by Strong Convective Events

The accuracy of convective transport in models is sometimes tested using chemical tracer measurements from short term field campaigns. However, in these types of comparisons, it is often difficult to determine whether the differences with the aircraft or balloon observations result from errors in the treatment of convection in the model, from chemistry, or in the way that the chemical tracer distributions in the model are initialized. In addition, because of the usually small number of comparisons available, it is often difficult to know whether the differences should be attributed to real model biases, or simply to the variability in the complex tracer anomaly patterns generated by strong convective events. Here, we use the biweekly ozonesonde profiles from the Southern Hemisphere Additional Ozonesondes (SHADOZ) campaign (1998 - present) at various tropical locations to construct composite ozone anomaly patterns about high rain events identified from the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) dataset. These anomaly patterns are then compared with the ozone anomaly patterns from several offline chemical transport models, generated using a similar methodology.