Stratospheric Aspects of Climate Forcing

Results of the SPARC working group assessing the stratospheric aspects of climate forcing were published in Karoly (2000). The SPARC data center provides access to data that have been found the current best estimates of relevant forcing parameters. These data are available for the use of the climate modeling community with the understanding that the original authors will be acknowledged in resulting publications.

Data are available on CEDA and can be accessed anonymously via:

sparc-ftp.ceda.ac.uk/sparc/clim_force/

Please use an ftp client such as FileZilla to connect to the ftp server as many browsers, including chrome, no longer support urls using the ftp protocol.

Ozone

The global stratospheric ozone trends data set by Randel and Wu (1999) and the hybrid monthly ozone data set from 1870 to 1990 by Kiehl et al. (1999) have been merged to a combined tropospheric and stratospheric data set. Bob Portmann from the NOAA Aeronomy Laboratory provided this data set, which is available on the ftp server at /sparc/clim_force/ozone/. Please note that the lower boundary of the grid is 2 km and that the ozone mixing ratio should be held constant at altitudes lower than this.

Stratospheric Volcanic Aerosols

Data which describe the radiative forcing of volcanic aerosols (Andronova et al., 1999) are available on the ftp server at /sparc/clim_force/volcano/.

Solar Irradiance Variations

Reconstructions of solar irradiance from 1610 to present (Lean et al., 1995) and the high resolution spectral estimates of solar irradiance from 115.5 nm to 425.5 nm during solar maximum and solar minimum based on satellite measurements (Lean et al., 1997) are available on the ftp server at /sparc/clim_force/solar/.

References

Andronova, N. G., E. V. Rozanov, F. Yang, M. E. Schlesinger, and G. L. Stenchikov (1999), Radiative forcing by volcanic aerosols from 1850 to 1994. J. Geophys. Res., 104, 16,807-16,826, doi:10.1029/1999JD900165.

Karoly, D.J., Stratospheric aspects of climate forcing, 2000. SPARC Newsletter, 14.

Kiehl, J. T., T. L. Schneider, R. W. Portman, and S. Solomon (1999), Climate forcing due to tropospheric and stratospheric ozone. J. Geophys. Res., 104, 31239-31254, doi:10.1029/1999JD900991.

Lean J., J. Beer and R. Bradley (1995), Reconstruction of solar irradiance since 1600: Implications for climate change. Geophys. Res. Lett., 22, 3195-3198, doi:10.1029/95GL03093.

Lean, J., G. J. Rottman, H. L. Kyle, T. N. Woods, J. R. Hickey, and L. C. Puga (1997), Detection and parameterization of variations in solar mid and near ultrviolet radiation (200 to 400 nm). J. Geophys. Res., 102, 29,939-29,956, doi:10.1029/97JD02092.

Randel, W. J., and F. Wu (1999), A stratospheric ozone trends data set for global modelling studies. Geophys. Res. Lett., 26, 3089-3092, doi:10.1029/1999GL900615.