Welcome to the DORA website!
DORA is a project funded by the Belgian Science Policy Office (BELSPO), which is realized at the Royal Belgian Institute for Space Aeronomy (BIRA-IASB), running from 2023 to 2025. The project is performed in the context of the LOTUS (Long-term Ozone Trends and Uncertainties, https://www.sparc-climate.org/activities/ozone-trends/) initiative within SPARC (Stratosphere-troposphere Processes and their Role in Climate) and the TOAR (Tropospheric Ozone Assessment Report, https://igacproject.org/activities/TOAR) initiative within IGAC (International Global Atmospheric Chemistry).
The DORA (Detection of Ozone Recovery in the Arctic) project focuses on ozone trends in the Arctic, which currently is a region far less explored in LOTUS and TOAR compared to tropical and mid-latitude regions. The aim of the project is to study the detection of ozone recovery due to reduced emissions of ozone depleting substances in the Arctic by performing long-term trend studies at ground-based stations. This is essential to understand, because stratospheric ozone plays a crucial role in providing protection against harmful UV radiation. Another aim is to analyze trends of tropospheric ozone, which is a harmful pollutant and a short-lived climate forcer. All this is especially important in the polar regions, where ozone is highly impacted by the effective-chlorine levels, which leads to the well-known “ozone hole” problematic. However, the much higher ozone natural variability in the Arctic, due to larger dynamical variability, complicates the observation of the ozone recovery in the Arctic and no evidence of positive ozone trends over the Arctic was found for the 2000-2016 period (WMO 2018).
This project will result in:
- trends from 7 FTIR (Fourier transform infrared) sites, supplemented by available ozone sounding measurements, in both the troposphere and the stratosphere,
- a representativeness study of the Arctic ground-based stations using CAMS (Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service) global reanalysis,
- an evaluation of satellite trends (from MEGRIDOP, SUNLIT, and IASI/METOP) using ground-based data,
- a study of the impact of tropospheric trends on total ozone trends.
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