One such pollutant is inorganic chlorine, Cly, which has reactive forms implicated in rapid ozone destruction. There is a clear correlation between Cly and the mean age across models. Moreover, the uncertainty in both Cly and mean age is more than a factor of 2 at these locations. Such large Cly variations will produce significant uncertainties in simulations of ozone chemistry. These results indicate that there is room for improvement in models that are used to predict the impact of industrial gases on the ozone layer, and inaccuracies in transport are a major source of the error.
Further research is critical to better understand and simulate atmospheric transport.
A dynamical aerosol model that describes the variability of aerosol properties as a function of aerosol optical thickness can address this issue. The volume size distributions inverted from the measured sky radiance represent the entire column of ambient particles. These data depict an aerosol regime in which accumulation mode particle size and volume increases as optical thickness increases. A dynamical aerosol model that is a function of optical thickness is constructed by fitting lognormal functions to the volume size distributions. The model is shown to recreate the correct independently measured sky radiance in the backscattering direction and to predict the phase function within model uncertainties of data collected in subsequent years.