A quiet cue ball sun

AJB says:
June 28, 2012 at 3:18 am
How much has been learnt since this was posted in 2004?
NOAA has an assessment from 2010:
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/csd/assessments/ozone/2010/twentyquestions/
That may be a good place to start. One conclusion: the long-term decrease in Ozone is not due primarily to the Sun.
Generally, there are two causes of stratospheric cooling:
a: depletion of stratospheric ozone
b: increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide
Figure 7 of http://www.remss.com/msu/msu_data_description.html shows the continued cooling of the lower stratosphere.

Leif Svalgaard says, June 28, 2012 at 5:04 am
One might argue that both TLT [lower troposphere) and TLS (lower stratosphere) have stabilized the last decade. It is hard to tell.
Hmm, I see what you mean. Here’s a longer view:
http://www.atmosphere.mpg.de/media/archive/1385.jpg
You could argue the same thing about the period between the El Chichon and Pinatubo eruptions so what caused the step change either side of both? Sudden fry-ups did something else perhaps, like driving H20 further up? NLCs on the increase sometime later perhaps, is that how more water gets right up there and why they appeared 2 years after Krakatoa went pop in 1883? More questions than answers.
Isn’t the brightness temperature series heavily gridded/smoothed though and quite deceptive? What struck me more after quickly plonking around the RSS/MSU site was the TLT/TLS global picture in March each year, particularly 2011 when the arctic hole appeared. For example:
http://www.remss.com/data/msu/graphics/tls/medium/global/ch_tls_2011_03_anom_v03_3.png
http://www.remss.com/data/msu/graphics/tls/medium/global/ch_tls_2012_03_anom_v03_3.png
… then compare with
http://www.theozonehole.com/images/larctic7.jpg
http://www.theozonehole.com/images/arcticdev372012.jpg
Large effect (ozone depleted by vortex driven brewing pot, etc. as down south). It seems to be a fast moving chaotic place up there; big globs of energy shunting around pretty quickly and randomly making their way from the tops of Willis’s big ‘ole tropical anvils to the poles.
What happens in the other dimension? Does the shape of the temperature gradient up through the stratosphere and beyond lurch about violently in a similar manner? A lot for an uneducated layman with a day job to get a feel for.
I’m having difficulty gauging the effect of stratospheric ozone in the IR. Is it wrong to think of the ozone layer as a GHG acting in both directions (i.e. diffusing incoming and outgoing IR at different frequencies)? I can’t find the IR spectrum (everything is UV focused) and I’m not sure how that would work at the quantum level anyway. Two lights shining through wispy fog but different colours [not refractive, probably irrelevant] and not directly opposing or static? Hmm, gradients everywhere; that changing zenith angle is the mother of complexity. The concentrations top and bottom would presumably alter the net effect significantly too; causing any assumed radiating height for S-B calculation purposes to shift up and down despite the layer remaining broadly in the same position. Or maybe that shifts too. Since there are different depletions top and bottom and it’s all blowing about like crazy, the IR performance of the layer as a whole must be immensely complex and chaotic. There are a lot of drivers potentially altering its IR characteristics, not to mention the question of thermosphere expansion/contraction top side following large solar particle events and heating from UV driven chemistry.
It’s as if the Sun is gradually feeding the ozone layer popcorn [varying with the solar cycle and shifts in incoming UV frequencies] and occasionally instantly trimming its afro hairdo while a polar vortex arrives randomly and rips a hole in the seat of its pants. And it’s spinning about like a drunken sailor with a toothache the whole time. Heck there’s a tad more going on up there than the superficial outreach stuff portrays with its lovely smooth curves. Good luck modelling that lot; a Bayesian field of error bar tulips with lots of butterflies springs to mind. So what is in the climate models?
Fantasy express journey terminated; please don black hat and point out where it started to leave the rails, no need to elaborate. This old graph with its rather well defined straight line trends has struck me as uncanny for a while though (Arosa balloon series):
http://www.atmosphere.mpg.de/media/archive/1287.gif
After all the anecdotal Viking arguments and zillions of dollars spent whittling things down, isn’t warming during the latter trend period more or less what we’re all now focused on? Arctic ice decline doesn’t follow directly but I tend to regard that as just another tulip field.
Can’t get to the up-to-present Arosa graph (server appears down for maintenance) but Bronnimann et al (2004) ) made an interesting first pass read:
http://www.giub.unibe.ch/klimet/docs/climdyn_2004_broennimannetal.pdf

AJB says:
June 29, 2012 at 2:00 am
I can’t find the IR spectrum (everything is UV focused)
The solar spectral irradiance is a subject of intense study, here is a pointer to a recent workshop:
http://lasp.colorado.edu/sorce/workshops/3_01_2012/
My daugther-in-law (Signe) is the ozone expert in the family, here is what she had to say a few years back:
http://www.leif.org.EOS/Nature/nature04746-Ozone-Recovery-Signe.pdf

Gist scanned briefly. Excellent! Thank you once again Leif.