Higher-resolution tropopause folding accounts for more stratospheric
ozone intrusions
Abstract
Ozone in the troposphere is a pollutant and greenhouse gas, and it is
crucial to better understand its transport from the ozone-rich
stratosphere. Tropopause folding, wherein stratospheric air intrudes
downward into the troposphere, enables stratosphere-to-troposphere ozone
transport (STT). However, systematic analysis of the relationship
between folding and tropospheric ozone, using data that can both capture
folding’s spatial scales and accurately represent tropospheric
chemistry, is lacking. Here, we compare folding in both high-resolution
(0.25°) reanalysis ERA5 and low-resolution (0.75°) chemical reanalysis
CAMSRA over one year. High-resolution folding is dramatically more
frequent and significantly better-correlated with tropospheric ozone. In
particular, folding of deep tropospheric extent is nearly 100% missing
at low resolution, and folding–ozone correlations increase most with
resolution along midlatitude storm tracks, where deep folding is most
common. Our results imply that STT is more attributable to tropopause
folding than implied by low-resolution analysis, likely associated with
resolving filamentary, deep folding.