© Author(s) 2006. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License. Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics Testing our understanding of Arctic denitrification using MIPAS-E satellite measurements in winter 2002/2003

• Main Author: G. C. Toon
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: 2006
• Subjects: Arctic
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.404.8279; http://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/docs/00/29/59/94/PDF/acp-6-3149-2006.pdf

Abstract. Observations of gas-phase HNO3 and N2O in the polar stratosphere from the Michelson Interferometer for Passive Atmospheric Sounding aboard the ENVISAT satellite (MIPAS-E) were made during the cold Arctic winter of 2002/2003. Vortex temperatures were unusually low in early winter and remained favourable for polar stratospheric cloud formation and denitrification until mid-January. MIPAS-E observations provide the first dataset with sufficient coverage of the polar vortex in mid-winter which enables a reasonable estimate of the timing of onset and spatial distribution of denitrification of the Arctic lower stratosphere to be performed. We use the observations from MIPAS-E to test the evolution of denitrification in the DLAPSE (Denitrification by Lagrangian Particle Sedimentation) microphysical denitrification model coupled to the SLIMCAT chemical transport