Short-term variability of total column ozone from the Dobson spectrophotometer measurements at Belsk, Poland, in the period 23 March 1963–31 December 2019

Abstract

Total column ozone (TCO) monitoring with the Dobson spectrophotometer no. 84 have been carried out at Belsk (51°50′, 20°47′), Poland, since 23 March 1963. TCO observations were made for various combinations of double wavelength pairs (AD, CD, CC′) and instrument settings (direct Sun, zenith blue, and zenith cloudy). In total, results of 115,736 manual observations were recorded in the period 1963–2019. The following metrics of the intraday TCO variability are examined: standard deviation divided by the mean value and the difference between the daily maximum and minimum divided by the mean value. The mean value, standard deviation, and 5th–95th percentile range for the intraday changes of the metrics are {1.6%, 0.8%, 2.5%} and {4.3%, 2.3%, 7.3%,}, respectively. To examine interday TCO variability, one-day changes of the metrics and the daily mean TCO are analysed. The corresponding statistics for one-day change of TCO are {−0.2%, 6.9%, 22.6%}. The short-term TCO variability changed only slightly (if ever) since the beginning of the ozone observations at Belsk.

Keywords:

• total column ozone
• short-term variability
• trends

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of Poland under Grant number 3841/E-41/S/2020; and the Chief Inspectorate of Environmental Protection, Poland under Grant number GIOŚ/19/2021/DMŚ/NFOŚ.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors

Data availability statement

The dataset used in this article is available on the PANGAEA repository (Rajewska-Więch et al., 2020, https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.919378).

Table 1. Statistical characteristics of intraday TCO variability: Mean value (Mean), standard deviation (SD), and Span (difference between the daily maximum and minimum TCO value).

Table 2. Statistical characteristics of the coefficient of variation, according formula (1), of the intraday TCO values.

Table 3. The same as Table 2 but for the relative range of the intraday variability according formula (2).

Table 4. Probability of the same distribution for the intraday metrics in the subperiod pairs by the two-sample Kolmogorov–Smirnov test.

Table 5. Statistical characteristics of one-day change of the coefficient variability.

Table 6. The same as Table 2 but for the one-day change of the relative range that is expressed in percentage point (PP).

Table 7. The same as Table 2 but for the relative one-day change of TCO according formula (3).

Table 8. Probability of the same distribution for the one-day change of the intraday metrics (CV, RR, and ΔTCO_X) in the subperiod pairs by the two-sample Kolmogorov–Smirnov test applied to the entire set of the Dobson measurements and various combinations of the instrument settings.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of Poland under Grant number 3841/E-41/S/2020; and the Chief Inspectorate of Environmental Protection, Poland under Grant number GIOŚ/19/2021/DMŚ/NFOŚ.