Collaborative Research: Augmenting the Ross Island-area automatic weather station network to develop a tropospheric ozone climatology

University Of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison WI

Investigators

Abstract

Polar tropospheric ozone concentrations exhibit strong seasonal variations and often just as strong anomalies, or ozone depletion events arising from spring destruction episodes. Using the existing Automatic Weather Stations network in the McMurdo Ross Sea region, a number of photometric based ozone meters will be deployed, in order to establish a multi-season record of surface level ozone distributions in the McMurdo area. This in turn will allow a record of seasonal surface ozone variability in the Ross Sea region to be assembled. A link between natural background processes influencing tropospheric ozone and any transported or local (McMurdo region, Ant) pollution components (such as NOx) or naturally sourced halogens is to be better explained. The continued career development of a post-doctoral associate, and also an undergraduate student involved in the proposal will be an aditional outcome of this work.