Correction to “Impacts of climate change, ozone recovery, and increasing methane on surface ozone and the tropospheric oxidizing capacity”

摘要

In the paper “Impacts of climate change, ozone recovery, and increasing methane on surface ozone and the tropospheric oxidizing capacity,” Olaf Morgenstern et al. (Journal of Geophysical Research – Atmospheres, 118, 1028–1041, doi:10.1029/2012JD018382, 2013) found that tropospheric photolysis rates were largely unaffected by stratospheric ozone changes and that other effects, e.g., due to differences in cloud cover or the sea ice albedo effect, were more important. Recently, an error has been discovered in the model setup used by Morgenstern et al. [2013]: Actually, photolysis rates in their model had not been based on the correct, interactive ozone field; instead, an ozone climatology had been used which did not respond to any differences in forcing between the simulations. Despite this error, the present-day reference presented by Morgenstern et al. [2013] compared well to observations; e.g., the background climatology of total column ozone in their Unified Model - UK Chemistry and Aerosols Module (UMUKCA) model was quite realistic, surface ozone for present-day conditions compared reasonably to observations, and the methane lifetime in UMUKCA was close a recent multimodel result [Voulgarakis et al., 2013]. Nonetheless, the model’s tropospheric chemistry did not quite realistically respond to ozone recovery. Other feedbacks, particularly stratosphere-troposphere exchange and the warming and moistening of the troposphere under climate change, were adequately captured. Telford et al. [2013] and studies derived from that paper are not affected by this issue.