Climatology of middle atmospheric conditions to support studies of future satellite middle atmospheric missions

This contribution presents a climatology of the atmospheric conditions that was created to support feasibility studies for the Changing Atmosphere Infra-Red Tomography explorer (CAIRT) candidate mission to ESA Earth Explorer 11. This climatology provides the mean and standard deviation of 35 atmospheric parameters (BrONO2, C2H2, C2H6, CCl4, CF4, CFC11, CFC12, CH4, ClO, ClONO2, CO, CO2, H2O, H2SO4, HCFC22, HCN, HDO, HNO3, HO2NO2, N2O, N2O5, NH3, NO, NO2, O, O1D, O2, O3, OCS, PAN, SF6, SO2, temperature, pressure and surface pressure) on a vertical grid between 0 and 200 km with 1 km spacing, five latitude bands (90°S–70°S, 55°S–35°S, 20°S–20°N, 35°N–55°N and 70°N–90°N), four months corresponding to different seasons (January, April, July, and October) and two overpass local times (09:30 and 21:30).

Since no single atmospheric model or dataset provides all relevant trace gases across the required vertical domain, this climatology was created by blending outputs from multiple simulations of different models : WACCM-ACOM, WACCM-AMIP, WACCM-X and BASCOE. For two species (CF4 and HDO), no model simulation has been found and their climatology is based on ACE-FTS observations. This contribution will describe the input models and observations and how they have been merged vertically when necessary. This climatology, named CAIRT ERS (Extended Reference Scenario) can be downloaded here: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10022129.