Vertical transport in the tropo-stratosphere by intermittent turbulence: a simultation study

Abstract

The possibility of a slow depletion of stratospheric ozone in reactions with pollutants inadvertently released in the lower atmosphere has received considerable attention over the past decade (see e.g. Kruger ad Setlow, 1982). Production and loss processes alone cannot be used to account for budgets of minor constituents in the stratosphere. Processes that effect their transport also need to be included. In the simplest and most widely employed one-dimensional (1-d) aeronomic models, transport coefficients are obtained from the observed profiles of a constituent whose chemistry id presumably well understood. In more sophisticated two and three dimensional models, transport by advection with atmospheric circulation is considered, but the effect of motions at scales smaller than some grid size are included only in a parametrized form, Estimates of transport coefficients, bases on direct observations of the underlying physical processes such as turbulence, are relatively scarse and have so far provided conflicting results.