Articles | Volume 26, issue 19
https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-26-13817-2026
https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-26-13817-2026
Research article
 | 
02 Oct 2026
Research article |  | 02 Oct 2026

Uncertainties in recent tropical stratospheric and tropospheric ozone changes limit the use of observational constraints for assessing future ozone change

Sean M. Davis, William T. Ball, Yue Jia, Gabriel Chiodo, Justin A. Alsing, James Keeble, Hideharu Akiyoshi, Carlo Arosio, Ewa M. Bednarz, Andreas Chrysanthou, Melanie Coldewey-Egbers, Robert Damadeo, Sandip Dhomse, Mohamadou A. Diallo, Simone Dietmuller, Roland Eichinger, Stacey Frith, Birgit Hassler, Michaela I. Hegglin, Daan Hubert, Patrick Jöckel, Béatrice Josse, Natalya Kramarova, Diego Loyola, Eliane Maillard Barras, Marion Marchand, Olaf Morgenstern, David Plummer, Robert W. Portmann, Karen H. Rosenlof, Alexei Rozanov, Viktoria F. Sofieva, Johannes Staehelin, Timofei Sukhodolov, Kleareti Tourpali, Ronald J. Van der A, H. J. Ray Wang, Krzysztof Wargan, Shingo Watanabe, Mark Weber, Jeannette D. Wild, Yousuke Yamashita, and Jerry Ziemke

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Cited articles

Acquah, C., Stecher, L., Mertens, M., and Jöckel, P.: Effects of different emission inventories on tropospheric ozone and methane lifetime, Atmos. Chem. Phys., 25, 13665–13686, https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-25-13665-2025, 2025.  
Alsing, J.: dlmmc: Dynamical linear model regression for atmospheric time-series analysis, Journal of Open Source Software, 4, 1157, https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.01157, 2019. 
APARC: The Hunga Volcanic Eruption Atmospheric Impacts Report, edited by: Zhu, Y., Mann, G., Newman, P. A., and Randel, W., APARC Report No. 11, WCRP-10/2025, https://doi.org/10.34734/FZJ-2025-05237, 2025. 
Arosio, C., Rozanov, A., Malinina, E., Eichmann, K.-U., von Clarmann, T., and Burrows, J. P.: Retrieval of ozone profiles from OMPS limb scattering observations, Atmos. Meas. Tech., 11, 2135–2149, https://doi.org/10.5194/amt-11-2135-2018, 2018. 
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This study investigates tropical ozone changes in models and satellite observations to determine how well they agree and whether observations can constrain model projections. At some levels, satellite records disagree significantly on the magnitude of ozone changes. While early and late 21st century trends are correlated across models, suggesting a potential emergent constraint, the spread in observations means they are unable to provide guidance on the credibility of model projections.
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