Atmos. Chem. Phys., 15, 2889–2902, 2015 www.atmos-chem-phys.net/15/2889/2015/ doi:10.5194/acp-15-2889-2015 © Author(s) 2015. CC Attribution 3.0 License. Stratospheric and mesospheric HO2 observations from the Aura Microwave Limb Sounder L. Millán1,2, S. Wang2, N. Livesey2, D. Kinnison3, H. Sagawa4, and Y. Kasai4 1Joint Institute for Regional Earth System Science and Engineering, University of California, Los Angeles, California, USA 2Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California, USA 3National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, Colorado, USA 4National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, Koganei, Tokyo, Japan Correspondence to: L. Millán (
[email protected]) Received: 18 June 2014 – Published in Atmos. Chem. Phys. Discuss.: 8 September 2014 Revised: 17 February 2015 – Accepted: 24 February 2015 – Published: 13 March 2015 Abstract. This study introduces stratospheric and meso- sphere where O3 chemistry is controlled by catalytic cycles spheric hydroperoxyl radical (HO2) estimates from the Aura involving the HOx (HO2, OH and H) family (Brasseur and Microwave Limb Sounder (MLS) using an offline retrieval Solomon, 2005): (i.e. run separately from the standard MLS algorithm). This new data set provides two daily zonal averages, one during X C O3 ! XO C O2 (R1) daytime from 10 to 0.0032 hPa (using day-minus-night dif- O C XO ! O2 C X; (R2) ferences between 10 and 1 hPa to ameliorate systematic bi- ases) and one during nighttime from 1 to 0.0032 hPa. The where the net effect of these two reactions is simply vertical resolution of this new data set varies from about 4 km O C O ! 2O (R3) at 10 hPa to around 14 km at 0.0032 hPa.