Observation of a Summer Tropopause Fold by Ozonesonde at Changchun, China: Comparison with Reanalysis and Model Simulation

Tropopause folds are one of the key mechanisms of stratosphere-troposphere exchange (STE) in extratropical regions, transporting ozone-rich stratospheric air into the middle and lower troposphere. Although there have been many studies of tropopause folds that have occurred over Europe and North America, a very limited amount of work has been carried out over northeastern Asia. Ozonesondes produced by the Institute of Atmospheric Physics were launched in Changchun (43.9°N, 125.2°E), Northeast China, in June 2013, and observed an ozone-enriched layer with thickness of 3 km and an ozone peak of 180 ppbv at 6 km in the troposphere. The circulation field from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts Interim Reanalysis (ERA-Interim) dataset shows that this ozone peak was caused by a tropopause fold associated with a jet stream at the eastern flank of the East Asian trough. By analyzing the ozone data from the ozone monitoring instrument and Weather Research and Forecasting model with Chemistry (WRF-Chem) simulations, it was found that a high ozone concentration tongue originating from the lower stratosphere at high latitude (near central Siberia) intruded into the middle troposphere over Changchun between 5 and 8 km on 12 June 2013. The high-resolution WRF-Chem simulation was capable of describing events such as the tropopause fold that occurred on the cyclonic shear side of the jet stream. In addition, the TRAJ3D trajectory model was used to trace the origin of measured secondary ozone peaks in the middle troposphere back, for example, to stratospheric intrusion through the tropopause fold.