Case studies on turbulence in different tropopause folds

Tropopause folds are known as areas of enhanced stratosphere-troposphere exchange. These exchange processes are governed by turbulent mixing in the upper-tropospheric and lower-stratospheric shear zones around the tropopause jet. Since the 1970s, turbulence is also predicted to enhance the ageostrophic circulation around the jet, which leads to the formation of the tropopause fold in an upper-level jet-front system. This claim was recently confirmed by a numerical weather prediction study using the ECMWF-IFS.

With our balloon-borne turbulence measuring instrument LITOS, we recently sounded a deep and a medium tropopause fold with astonishing results: in both cases, the strength of turbulence in the lower stratospheric shear layer was three orders of magnitude higher compared to the upper tropospheric shear layer, reaching severe turbulence strengths in the deep-fold case. This has not been reported before, potentially because hardly any observational turbulence study covering both shear layers exists in the literature. In our study, we also quantitatively compare turbulence induced PV changes with PV profiles from the IFS and assess the meteorological situation using further IFS data. Additionally, we investigate mixing processes from tracer-tracer correlations of ozone and water vapour along the flight track of our instrument.