Simulation of the stratospheric ozone and temperature response to the solar irradiance variability during sun rotation cycle

Despite substantial progress in atmospheric modeling, the agreement of the simulated atmospheric response to decadal scale solar variability with the solar signal in different atmospheric quantities obtained from the statistical analysis of the observations cannot be qualified as successful. An alternative way to validate the simulated solar signal is to compare the sensitivity of the model to the solar irradiance variability on shorter time scales. To study atmospheric response to the 28-day solar rotation cycle, we used the chemistry-climate model SOCOL that represents the main physical-chemical processes in the atmosphere from the ground up to the mesopause. An ensemble simulation has been carried out, which is comprised of nine 1-year long runs, driven by the spectral solar irradiance prescribed on a daily basis using UARS SUSIM measurements for the year 1992. The correlation of zonal mean hydroxyl, ozone and temperature averaged over the tropics with solar irradiance time series have been analyzed. The hydroxyl has robust correlations with solar irradiance in the upper stratosphere and mesosphere, because the hydroxyl concentration is defined mostly by the photolysis. The simulated sensitivity of the hydroxyl to the solar irradiance changes is in good agreement with previous estimations. The ozone and temperature correlations are more complicated because their behavior depends on non-linear dynamics and transport in the atmosphere. The model simulates marginally significant ozone response to the solar irradiance variability during the Sun rotation cycle, but the simulated temperature response is not robust. The physical nature of this is not clear yet. It seems likely that the temperature (and partly the ozone) daily fields possess their own internal variability, which is not stable and can differ from year to year reflecting different dynamical states of the system. (C) 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.