Stratospheric temperatures over the Arctic: Comparison of three data sets

• Main Authors: Karin Labitzke, Markus Kunze
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: 2005
• Subjects: Arctic; North Pole
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.537.2811; http://strat-www.met.fu-berlin.de/labitzke/comp/MZ-Labitzke-2005.pdf

Three sets of stratospheric temperatures (at the 50-and 30-hPa level) are compared for middle and particularly high northern latitudes. Two of the data sets are re-analyses (NCEP / NCAR and ERA40) while the FU-Berlin data are historical hand-analyses. The time period covered is September 1957 till June 2001, because the FU-Berlin data span this period. As the variability and any trends over the Arctic are of profound interest in connection with Global Change and the ozone problem, it is very important to see if and how these data sets agree and to what extend the early data, before satellites became available, are reliable. Therefore, 30-hPa temperatures over the North Pole and 50-hPa temper-atures at 80oN are compared, i.e. long-term monthly means, standard deviations and trends. In such a comparison one has to remember that the natural variability is very high during the arctic winter and that ra-diosonde stations are not available directly over the North Pole nor over