Conclusion

My goals were to create daily global tropospheric ozone maps using OSIRIS and TOMS data and to find the geographical locations where the concentration of tropospheric ozone was systematically large. For this I downloaded the daily total column ozone data measured by TOMS and all available stratospheric ozone profiles (newest version 012) measured by OSIRIS (about 2500 data files in total). All OSIRIS data were organized into separate folders on a daily basis. I used the software given to me by the scientists at the University of Saskatchewan (Saskatoon, Canada) to open these data files, to calculate the difference between OSIRIS and TOMS daily data and to plot this difference on a global map.

More than 200 tropospheric ozone maps were created for the period from November 1, 2001 until December 21, 2002. To analyze these results, I looked at each map individually and produced diagrams that showed the number of days with the high tropospheric ozone concentrations over different geographic regions in the Northern and Southern hemispheres for the warm and cold seasons. From November 2001 until December 2002, only around Japan the tropospheric ozone was always present at high concentrations. Whether this was caused by the industry or some other sources, I cannot say for sure without further studies, but its possible industrial source has been previously reported in some publications. In the toposphere above some other countries/continents, unlike Japan, ozone only occasionally did the ozone actually originate in those countries/continents, but most of the time the ozone floated over from someplace else. Also, after comparing the maps for November 2001 – February 2002 with those for November - December 2002, I found that the amount of tropospheric ozone in the Southern Hemisphere actually decreased. Another interesting observation I have made is that concerning the North and South poles, around which high concentrations of tropospheric ozone are present at all times and occasionally float North (or South) to places such as Canada, Europe and South America.

All data sets created during this work (TOMS total ozone daily data and daily maps, OSIRIS ozone data organized into folders on a daily basis and OSIRIS daily stratospheric ozone column maps, and tropospheric ozone daily maps) have been given to the scientists at the University of Saskatchewan. All maps presented as examples in this project were used with the permission of Canadian OSIRIS Team members.

 

 

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