Calculations of Stratospheric Ozone and Effects of Diffusivity

Abstract

This paper presents a system approach of mass balance of ozone and other species under diffusion-convection-reaction processes to study the ozone layer along the altitude in the stratosphere. The ozone abundance and general distribution above the tropical area were calculated and compared to the published measured data. The peak ozone layer was found to be 21 mPa at 22 km or 9.7 ppm at 30 km, and the involved competing processes depicting the ozone layer were explained in details. In the entire stratosphere from 10 km to 50 km, the calculated ozone distribution displayed a similar profile and trend to the observational data, with the calculation in ppm slightly above the measurement by 12%. The standard deviation of the differences between calculated and measured data was close to 0.25. A sensitivity study of gas diffusivities of molecular ozone D 3 and atomic oxygen D 1 on changing the ozone abundance and profile in the stratosphere showed that in the upper two-third of the stratosphere, D 1 evidently exhibited a pronounced impact on ozone, as much as 24-fold larger than D 3 . The mechanism leading to this finding was also elaborated. The approach and calculations in this paper are shown to be useful for providing an initial insight into the structure and behavior of the complex ozone layer.