On the importance of interactive ozone chemistry in earth-system models for studying mesophere-lower thermosphere tidal changes during sudden stratospheric warmings

In the first setup, the ozone concentrations are interactively calculated in the model and resemble the ozone observations during the 2009 SSW event, while in the second setup, the ozone concentrations are specified using zonal mean values. We constrain both of the simulations to the Modern-Era Retrospective Analysis for Research and Applications-2 reanalysis so that the background atmosphere through which the solar tides propagate are almost identical in each case.

Following the onset of the SSW, we find that in the vicinity of the peak enhancements of SW1, SW2, and SW3 in the mesosphere-lower thermosphere (MLT), the amplitudes of these semidiurnal solar tides are approximately about 15-50% larger for the simulation with interactive ozone as compared with the one with prescribed ozone, indicating that the stratospheric ozone variability plays an important role in driving semidiurnal solar tidal changes during SSWs.