Multi-year Composite View of Ozone Enhancements and Stratosphere-to-troposphere Transport in Dry Intrusions of Northern Hemisphere Extratropical Cyclones

We examine the role of extratropical cyclones in stratosphere-to-troposphere (STT) exchange with cyclone-centric composites of O retrievals from the Microwave Limb Sounder (MLS) and the Tropospheric Emission Spectrometer (TES), contrasting them to composites obtained with the Modern-Era Retrospective-analysis for Research and Applications (MERRA and MERRA-2) reanalyses and the GEOS-Chem chemical transport model. We identify 15,978 extratropical cyclones in the northern hemisphere (NH) for 2005-2012. The lowermost stratosphere (261 hPa) and middle troposphere (424 hPa) composites feature a 1,000 km-wide O enhancement in the dry intrusion (DI) airstream to the southwest of the cyclone center, coinciding with a lowered tropopause, enhanced potential vorticity, and decreased HO. MLS composites at 261 hPa show that the DI O enhancements reach a 210 ppbv maximum in April. At 424 hPa, TES composites display maximum O enhancements of 27 ppbv in May. The magnitude and seasonality of these enhancements are captured by MERRA and MERRA-2, but GEOS-Chem is a factor of two too low. The MERRA-2 composites show that the O-rich DI forms a vertically aligned structure between 300 and 800 hPa, wrapping cyclonically with the warm conveyor belt. In winter and spring DIs, O is enhanced by 100 ppbv or 100-130% at 300 hPa, with significant enhancements below 500 hPa (6-20 ppbv or 15-30%). We estimate that extratropical cyclones result in a STT flux of 119±56 Tg O yr, accounting for 42±20 % of the NH extratropical O STT flux. The STT flux in cyclones displays a strong dependence on westerly 300 hPa wind speeds.