Updated Trends of Stratospheric Ozone over Seoul

Atmospheric ozone changes temporally and spatially according to both anthropogenic and natural causes. It is essential to quantify the natural contributions to total ozone variations for the estimation of trend caused by anthropogenic processes. The aims of this study are to understand the intrinsic natural variability of long-term total ozone changes and to estimate more reliable ozone trend caused by anthropogenic ozone-depleting materials. For doing that, long-term time series for Seoul of monthly total ozone which were measured from both ground-based Dobson Spectrophotometer (Beck #124)(1985-2004) and satellite TOMS (1979-1984) are analyzed for selected period, after dividing the whole period (1979 2004) into two periods; the former period (1979-1991) and the latter period (19922004). In this study, ozone trends for the time series are calculated using multiple regression models with explanatory natural oscillations for the Arctic Oscillation(AO), North Atlantic Oscillation(NAO), North Pacific Oscillation(NPO), Pacific Decadal Oscillation(PDO), Quasi Biennial Oscillation(QBO), Southern Oscillation(SO), and Solar Cycle(SC) including tropopause pressure(TROPP). Using the developed models, more reliable anthropogenic ozone trend is estimated than previous studies that considered only QBO and SC as natural oscillations (eg; WMO, 1999). The quasi-anthropogenic ozone trend in Seoul is estimated to -0.12 %/decade during the whole period, -2.39 %/decade during the former period, and +0.10 %/decade during the latter period, respectively. Consequently, the net forcing mechanism of the natural oscillations on the ozone variability might be noticeably different in two time intervals with positive forcing for the former period (1979-1991) and negative forcing for the latter period (1992-2004). These results are also found to be consistent with those analyzed from the data observed at ground stations (Sapporo, Tateno) of Japan. In addition, the recent trend analyses for Seoul show positive change-in-trend estimates of +0.75 %/decade since 1997 relative to negative trend of-1.49 %/decade existing prior to 1997, showing -0.74 %/decade for the recent 8 -year period since 1997. Also, additional supporting evidence for a slowdown in ozone depletion in the upper stratosphere has been obtained by Newchurch et al.(2003).