Tropical Tropospheric Ozone and Biomass Burning
Anne M. Thompson,12*
Jacquelyn
C. Witte,14
Robert
D. Hudson,2
Hua Guo,3
Jay R. Herman,1
Masatomo Fujiwara5
New methods for retrieving tropospheric ozone column depth and
absorbing aerosol (smoke and dust) from the Earth
Probe-Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer (EP/TOMS) are
used to follow pollution and to determine interannual variability and
trends. During intense fires over Indonesia (August to November 1997),
ozone plumes, decoupled from the smoke below, extended as far as India.
This ozone overlay a regional ozone increase triggered by atmospheric responses to the El Niño and Indian Ocean Dipole. Tropospheric ozone and smoke aerosol measurements from the Nimbus 7 TOMS instrument show El Niño signals but no tropospheric ozone trend in the
1980s. Offsets between smoke and ozone seasonal maxima point to
multiple factors determining tropical tropospheric ozone variability.
1 NASA-Goddard Space Flight Center,
Code 916, Greenbelt, MD 20771, USA.
2 Department of
Meteorology and
3 Department of Computer Sciences,
University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742, USA;
4 Science Systems and Applications, Lanham, MD
20706, USA;
5 Graduate School of Environmental Earth
Science, Hokkaido University, Sapporo 060-0810, Japan.
*
To whom correspondence should be addressed: E-mail:
anne.m.thompson{at}gsfc.nasa.gov
