ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Earth Sci.
Sec. Atmospheric Science
Volume 13 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/feart.2025.1610651
This article is part of the Research TopicThe Evolution of the Stratospheric Ozone - Volume IIView all 4 articles
Are springtime Arctic ozone columns predictable from wintertime conditions?
Provisionally accepted
- 1University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences Vienna, Vienna, Austria
- 2Columbia University, New York City, New York, United States
- 3Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
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The northern hemisphere stratospheric polar vortex, and thus Arctic column ozone content, is characterized by large interannual variability, driven by the interplay of various chemical and dynamical forcings throughout the winter and spring seasons. The 2023/24 season showed record high March total column ozone, whereas 2010/11 and 2019/20 experienced large springtime Arctic ozone losses due to an exceptionally strong and prolonged polar vortex state. The winter/spring 2015/16 were also remarkable, in that unprecedented cold stratospheric temperatures in January were interrupted by a sudden stratospheric warming event, and the fears of large springtime ozone losses turned out to be unfounded. Our main research question is motivated by these events: To which extent can springtime Arctic ozone columns be predicted from the preceding wintertime observational record? To this end we investigate the suitability of wintertime mean polar cap temperature, PSC proxies and eddy heat flux as predictors of springtime ozone in ERA5 and MERRA2 reanalysis data. Our results show that using these predictors springtime ozone can only be ‘forecast’ with short lead times, and even then with limited accuracy. In contrast expanding the analysis to ozone observations earlier in the season, we find substantially higher predictive skill compared to temperature, PSC proxies or eddy heat flux: this can be understood as ozone reflecting both the chemical and dynamical conditions over the northern polar cap.
Keywords: Ozone, polar vortex, sudden stratospheric warming, Ozone Depleting Substances, Polar stratospheric clouds, Arctic
Received: 12 Apr 2025; Accepted: 08 Aug 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Rieder, Kult-Herdin, Polvani, Solomon and Kuchar. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Harald Rieder, University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences Vienna, Vienna, Austria
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