| Summary: | It has become a public concern that ozone depletion in the stratosphere would lead to increasing ultraviolet radiation on the surface. That stratospheric polar ozone depletion which likely has important impacts on atmospheric circulations and climate has also been one of important topics in climate research in the past few years. Observational studies showed that in the seasons with severe ozone depletion in stratospheric polar regions, surface air temperatures have a significant tendency of warming in the past few decades, that is, surface air temperatures demonstrate warming trends over the high-latitude Europe-Asia continent during February-March and over the Antarctic Peninsula during December-May. The warming is not due to direct radiative effect of ozone depletion, instead, it is throughout dynamic processes, such as wave-mean flow and stratosphere-troposphere interactions. There have been a lot of numerical simulations on this problem. Some simulations show consistent results with observations, while others point out that the impact of ozone depletion alone is too weak, and that other forcings are also important. The author reviews the progress in this field in the past few years, summarizes these observational and simulation results, interprets the physical mechanism of stratospheric polar ozone depletion impacting on the troposphere, and clarifies controversies. EI 0 5 561-568 42
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