Airborne Arctic Stratospheric Expedition 2: An overview

The sudden onset of ozone depletion in the antarctic vortex set a precedent for both the time scale and the severity of global change. The Airborne Antarctic Ozone Experiment (AAOE), stages from Punta Arenas, Chile, in 1987, established that CFCs, halons, and methyl bromide, the dominant sources of chlorine and bromide radicals in the stratosphere, control the rate of ozone destruction over the Antarctic; that the vortex is depleted in reactive nitrogen and water vapor; and that diabatic cooling during the antarctic winter leads to subsidence within the vortex core, importing air from higher altitudes and lower latitudes. This last conclusion is based on observed dramatic distortion in the tracer fields, most notably N2O. In 1989, the first Airborne Arctic Stratospheric Expedition (AASE-1), staged from Stavanger, Norway, and using the same aircraft employed for AAOE (the NASA ER-2 and the NASA DC-8), discovered that while NO(x) and to some degree NO(y) were perturbed within the arctic vortex, there was little evidence for desiccation. Under these (in contrast to the antarctic) marginally perturbed conditions, however, ClO was found to be dramatically enhanced such that a large fraction of the available (inorganic) chlorine resided in the form of ClO and its dimer ClOOCl. This leaves two abiding issues for the northern hemisphere and the mission of the second Airborne Arctic Stratospheric Expedition (AASE-2): (1) Will significant ozone erosion occur within the arctic vortex in the next ten years as chlorine loading in the stratosphere exceeds four parts per billion by volume? (2) Which mechanisms are responsible for the observed ozone erosion poleward of 30 deg N in the winter/spring northern hemisphere reported in satellite observations?