TITLE:
Calculations of Stratospheric Ozone and Effects of Diffusivity
AUTHORS:
Laurie Wei, Ibraheem Alelmi, Sen Nieh
KEYWORDS:
Ozone, Stratospheric Distribution, Modeling, Diffusivity
JOURNAL NAME:
Atmospheric and Climate Sciences,
Vol.13 No.3,
July
18,
2023
ABSTRACT: This paper presents a system approach of mass
balance of ozone and other species under diffusion-convection-reaction
processes to study the ozone layer along the altitude in the stratosphere. The
ozone abundance and general distribution above the tropical area were
calculated and compared to the published measured data. The peak ozone layer was
found to be 21 mPa at 22 km or 9.7 ppm at 30 km, and the involved competing
processes depicting the ozone layer were explained in details. In the entire
stratosphere from 10 km to 50 km, the calculated ozone distribution displayed a
similar profile and trend to the observational data, with the calculation in
ppm slightly above the measurement by 12%. The standard deviation of the
differences between calculated and measured data was close to 0.25. A
sensitivity study of gas diffusivities of molecular ozone D3 and atomic oxygen D1 on changing the ozone abundance and profile in the stratosphere showed that in
the upper two-third of the stratosphere, D1 evidently exhibited a pronounced impact on ozone, as much as 24-fold larger
than D3. The mechanism
leading to this finding was also elaborated. The approach and calculations in
this paper are shown to be useful for providing an initial insight into the
structure and behavior of the complex ozone layer.