What is it about?
The paper shows that fast changes in ozone (on daily to monthly scale) can impact surface weather. This can cause deterioration of seasonal forecasts, and often even produce the inverse result compared to the seasonal forecast. For instance, all seasonal forecasts predicted a negative Southern Annular Mode for spring 2019, while in reality, the Southern Annular Mode was positive for about six weeks in September-October 2019.
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Photo by Andrei Lazarev on Unsplash
Why is it important?
None of the world's seasonal forecasting systems include the effects of variations of ozone on weather. This means seasonal forecast products for stakeholders are much more uncertain during spring and summer than they might think. Including ozone chemistry is computationally very expensive, but given our results, it might still be worth the investment given the potential for better seasonal forecasts.
Perspectives
Given the annual variability of the size and strength of the ozone hole, any users of seasonal forecasts, and even researchers, might be surprised variations of ozone is not included in the forecasts. What this paper does is to make it very visible what it might mean to neglect such variations, and it proposes a physical mechanism and pathway for stratospheric ozone to influence surface weather.
Dr Martin Jucker
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Ozone‐Forced Southern Annular Mode During Antarctic Stratospheric Warming Events, Geophysical Research Letters, February 2022, American Geophysical Union (AGU),
DOI: 10.1029/2021gl095270.
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