Intercomparison campaign of vertical ozone profiles including electrochemical sondes of ECC and Brewer-Mast type and a ground based UV-differential absorption lidar

An intercomparison campaign was conducted at the Observatoire de Haute Provence (OHP) in Southern France in September 1989 in order to compare the three instruments used for vertical tropospheric ozone profiling in the European TOR (Tropospheric Ozone Research Project) network: balloon borne ECC and Brewer-Mast sondes and a ground based UV-DIAL (DifferentialAbsorptionLidar). Additionally, a stratospheric lidar system and the Dobson spectrophotometer of the OHP were operated. Seven simultaneously measured vertical ozone profiles gave evidence for systematic differences of 15% between both types of electrochemical sondes in the troposphere, the Brewer-Mast sondes reading the smaller ozone values. These differences might be explained on the one hand by a possible contamination of the ozone sensor with reducing substances, causing a negative bias mainly for Brewer-Mast sondes and, on the other hand, by the evolution of the sonde background current during the flight, causing a positive bias for ECC sondes and a negative bias for Brewer-Mast sondes. The tropospheric lidar system, measuring the vertical ozone distribution between 6 and 12–15 km, showed ozone concentrations intermediate between the sonde results. This is in good agreement with its estimated systematic error of better than 7% in the upper troposphere. In the stratosphere, the differences between electrochemical sondes and the lidar are between 5 and 10% before the normalisation with the total ozone values measured by the Dobson spectrophotometer, and always below 5% after. While the Dobson normalisation thus corrects rather well the stratospheric part of the sonde profile, it only partially reduces errors occurring in the troposphere.