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Stratospheric aerosols are greatly influenced by medium-to-large volcanic eruptions. Over the last few years, extreme wildfires have been identified as new sources of stratospheric particles, in the form of carbonaceous aerosols injected by pyrocumulonimbus (pyroCb) events in the upper troposphere and lower stratosphere, associated with significant impacts on climate and ozone chemistry. To assess the impact of wildfires and volcanic eruptions on stratospheric aerosol loadings in the Northern Hemisphere, the Rapid Balloon Experiments for Sudden Aerosol Injection in the Stratosphere (REAS) project has been initiated. REAS is an international initiative that aims to respond to sudden events impacting stratospheric aerosol composition. Seventeen balloons were launched from Reims, eastern France, between November 2021 and January 2022 to quantify the atmospheric content for both aerosols and trace/greenhouse gases from the ground up to stratospheric levels. The main measurements concerned trace gases (CO/CO2 as tracers of smoke) and aerosol together with ozone using instruments such as a gas collector, optical particle counters, backscatter sondes, an aerosol sampler, an aerosol impactor, and ozonesondes. The Groupe de Spectrométrie Moléculaire et Atmosphérique (GSMA) launch facility provided unique possibilities of combining multiple measurements in one flight thanks to medium flights (corresponding to a 6 kg payload). While no major event impacted the stratosphere during the campaign, we particularly discuss the influence of the aged volcanic plume from La Soufrière volcano (Saint Vincent island) and smoke particles from series of pyroCb events that took place in North America. The burden as well as the optical and microphysical properties of the observed aerosols are quantified from these in situ observations in association with various satellite data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a study on the intercomparison of ozone profiles in Antarctica to quantify ozone depletion or recovery. The study employed Infrared Atmospheric Sounding Interferometer (IASI) instrument, global positioning system (GPS) receiver, MetOp satellite collected at McMurdo Station, Antarctica, during the Concordiasi campaign. Results reveal that overestimation of ozone cannot be explained by the IASI to measure the high gradient because of zone depletion process.

The method to derive aerosol size distributions from in situ stratospheric measurements from the University of Wyoming is modified to include an explicit counting efficiency function (CEF) to describe the channel-dependent instrument counting efficiency. This is motivated by Kovilakam and Deshler's (2015, https://doi.org/10.1002/2015JD023303) discovery of an error in the calibration method applied to the optical particle counter (OPC40) developed in the late 1980s and used from 1991 to 2012. The method can be applied to other optical aerosol instruments for which counting efficiencies have been measured. The CEF employed is the integral of the Gaussian distribution representing the instrument response at any one aerosol channel, the aerosol counting efficiency. Results using the CEF are compared to previous derivations of aerosol size distributions (Deshler et al., 2003, https://doi.org/10.1029/2002JD002514) applied to the measurements before and after Kovilakam and Deshler's correction of number concentration for the OPC40 calibration error. The CEF method is found, without any tuning parameter, to reproduce or improve upon the Kovilakam and Deshler's results, thus accounting for the calibration error without any external comparisons other than the laboratory determined counting efficiency at each aerosol channel. Moments of the new aerosol size distributions compare well with aerosol extinctions measured by Stratospheric Aerosol and Gas Experiment II and Halogen Occultation Experiment in the volcanic period 1991-1996, generally within ±40%, the precision of OPC40 moments, and in the nonvolcanic period after 1996, generally within ±20%. Stratospheric Aerosol and Gas Experiment II and Halogen Occultation Experiment estimates of aerosol surface area are generally in agreement with those derived using the new CEF method.