HR: 0830h
AN: A21C-0975    [PDF]
TI: Dynamics of the Upper Reaches of the Polar Vortex, Using EOS MLS Data.
AU: * Pumphrey, H C
EM: hcp@met.ed.ac.uk
AF: School of GeoSciences The University of Edinburgh, Mayfield Road, Edinburgh, EH9 3JZ United Kingdom
AU: Manney, G L
EM: manney@mls.jpl.nasa.gov
AF: Jet Propulsion Laboratory, mail stop 183-701, Jet Propulsion Laboratory 4800 Oak Grove Drive, Pasadena, 91109-8099 United States
AB: The lower part of polar vortex has been studied in enormous detail and many aspects of it are well understood. This is less true of the upper reaches of the vortex, roughly from the stratopause upwards. The main reasons for this are the relative lack of measurements at these altitudes. In particular, most of the popular meteorological analysis products used for studying the dynamics of the stratosphere do not cover the mesosphere and very little data are assimilated into the upper layers of these analyses. The UARS mission provided measurements of a number of chemical species which are useful as dynamical tracers at these altitudes: H$_2$O from MLS and CO from ISAMS are examples. These data are immensely valuable, but they all suffer from sparseness caused by a variety of factors such as the UARS yaw cycle, instrument failures and the use of solar occultation as a measurement technique. The EOS MLS instrument will make daily global measurements of CO, H$_2$O and HCN throughout the stratosphere and mesosphere. In addition, its measurements of temperature and geopotential height will be of sufficient quality to provide a dynamical context for the tracer measurements at altitudes where few meteorological assimilation datasets are available. In this poster we use UARS measurements of CO, H$_2$O and ATMOS measurements of HCN, together with precision estimates for EOS MLS, to examine the usefulness of the EOS MLS measurements for studying the upper vortex.
DE: 0340 Middle atmosphere--composition and chemistry
DE: 0341 Middle atmosphere--constituent transport and chemistry (3334)
DE: 0394 Instruments and techniques
DE: 3332 Mesospheric dynamics
SC: Atmospheric Sciences [A]
MN: 2003 Fall Meeting