Comparison of ground‐based Dobson and satellite EP‐TOMS total ozone measurements over Vernadsky station, Antarctica, 1996–2005

Abstract

Total ozone content derived from version 8 of the Earth Probe Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer (EP‐TOMS) satellite data was compared with that from ground‐based data obtained with the Dobson spectrophotometer no. 031 at the Ukrainian Antarctic Vernadsky station. The period of comparison is 1996–2005. The statistics for cloudy and clear sky observations are presented separately, in order to assess the influence of cloudiness on the difference between the satellite and ground‐based measurements. The main findings obtained from the TOMS–Dobson difference analysis were: (i) a significant disagreement between clear and cloudy sky differences of about 9%, which is almost the same value as in version 7; and (ii) the difference for all data equals −2.0% (2625 days), whereas in cloudless and cloudy conditions the difference is 4.1% (137 days) and −4.5% (1048 days), respectively. We conclude that the TOMS (Dobson) measurements are mostly responsible for the data disagreement in clear (cloudy) sky conditions.

Acknowledgements

This work was partly supported by National Taras Shevchenko University of Kyiv, project 06BF051‐12, by Grant Greece–Ukraine M/86‐2006 of the Ministry Education and Science of Ukraine, and by the National Antarctic Scientific Centre of the Ukraine: projects N/2‐2005 and N/10‐2007. This research was partly undertaken in the framework of the ORACLE‐O3 IPY project. TOMS data are from the NASA website http://toms.gsfc.nasa.gov. We thank the anonymous referee for useful comments and corrections.