50 years of balloon-borne ozone profile measurements at Uccle,Belgium: short history, scientific relevance and achievements inunderstanding the vertical ozone distribution

Abstract. Starting in 1969, and with three launches a week, the Uccle (Brussels, Belgium) ozonesonde dataset is one of longest and densest of the world. Moreover, as the only major change was the switch from Brewer-Mast to Electrochemical Concentration Cell (ECC) ozonesonde types in 1997 (when the emissions of ozone depleting substances peaked), the Uccle time series is very homogenous. In this paper, we briefly describe which efforts have been taken during the first three decades of the 50 years of ozonesonde observations to guarantee the homogeneity between ascent and descent profiles, under changing environmental conditions (e.g. SO2), and between the different ozonesonde types. This paper focuses on the 50 years long Uccle ozonesonde dataset and aims to demonstrate its past, present and future relevance to ozone research in two application areas: (i) the assessment of the temporal evolution of ozone from the surface to the (middle) stratosphere, and (ii) as backbone for validation and stability analysis of both stratospheric as well as tropospheric satellite ozone retrievals. Using the Long-term Ozone Trends and Uncertainties in the Stratosphere (LOTUS) multiple linear regression model (SPARC/IO3C/GAW, 2019), we found that the stratospheric ozone concentrations at Uccle declined at a significant rate of around 2 %/decade since 1969, rather consistently over the different stratospheric levels. This overall decrease can mainly be assigned to the 1969–1996 period with a rather consistent decline rate around −4 %/decade. Since 2000, a recovery between +1 to +3 %/decade of the stratospheric ozone levels above Uccle is observed, although not significant and not for the upper stratospheric levels measured by ozonesondes. Throughout the entire free troposphere, a very consistent increase of the ozone concentrations at 2 to 3 %/decade is measured since both 1969 and 1995, the latter trend being in almost perfect agreement with the trends derived from the In-service Aircraft for a Global Observing System (IAGOS) ascent/descent profiles at Frankfurt. As the amount of tropopause folding events in the Uccle time series increased significantly over time, increased stratosphere-to-troposphere transport of recovering stratospheric ozone might partly explain these increasing tropospheric ozone concentrations, despite the levelling off in (tropospheric) ozone precursor emissions and notwithstanding the continued increase of mean surface ozone concentrations. Furthermore, we illustrate the crucial role of ozonesonde measurements for validation of satellite ozone profile retrievals. With the operational validation of Global Ozone Monitoring Experiment GOME-2, we show how the Uccle dataset can be used to evaluate the performance of a degradation correction for the MetOp-A/GOME-2 UV sensors. In another example, we illustrate that the Microwave Limb Sounder (MLS) overpass ozone profiles in the stratosphere agree within ±5 % with the Uccle ozone profiles between 10 and 70 hPa. Another instrument on the same AURA satellite platform, Tropospheric Emission Spectrometer (TES), is generally positively biased with respect to the Uccle ozonesondes in the troposphere by up to ~10 ppbv, corresponding to relative differences up to ~15 %. Using the Uccle ozonesonde time series as reference, we also demonstrate that the temporal stability of those last two satellite retrievals is excellent.