OZONE DYNAMICS IN THE MEDITERRANEAN BASIN

A collection of scientific papers resulting from the MECAPIP, RECAPMA and SECAP Projects.

ISBN: 84-921259-1-8
Depósito legal: V-3667-2002
Design: Printed by: La Imprenta Comunicación Gráfica, S.L. Spain

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Prologue

Southern Europe is unique. It is located in the subtropical latitudes, it has a very complex orography, and it incorporates the world's largest inland sea, the Mediterranean. The Mediterranean basin is surrounded by high mountains along its entire European and Asian perimeter, and the western basin is further confined by the Atlas mountains in northern Africa. As a result, well-recognized climatic differences exist between Southern and Central/Northern Europe. Less recognized, but just as important, are the links that these Southern Europe climatic conditions have with the orography and the atmospheric environmental problems in the region.

In summer, atmospheric circulations across the Mediterranean are dominated by the Azores High at the west and the Asian Monsoon system at the east, and pressure differences of up to » 30 to 40 hPa can develop between the Atlantic coast of Portugal and the Arabian peninsula. Supported by the prevailing orography, extensive and deep convective cells develop during the day, which lead to deep "orographically-aided convection". Thus, subordinate to the major weather structures, other large mesoscale circulations develop with marked diurnal cycles, i.e. the Iberian, Italian and Anatolian Thermal Lows. These, together with their compensatory subsidences over the seas, strongly influence the vertical evolution of the regional flows during the day.

Our awareness of the peculiarities of the meteorological processes in this region began in 1979 after tracking the dispersion from a tall stack plume (340 m in Andorra, Teruel, Spain) followed, within a week, by the Fourth European Campaign for the Remote Sensing of Air Pollution near the Turbigo power plant (Po Valley, Italy). In both cases, nearly 180º diurnal oscillations in the plume directions were observed under the effect of the breeze in the Po valley and under the effects of the Iberian Thermal Low in Spain. Further evidences of the effects of "local" circulations and their vertical extent were obtained during the Sixth European Remote Sensing Campaign in Foss Berre (Marseilles, France, 1983). Air pollution layers associated with the return flows of the seabreeze were identified at » 2000 (+) m asl by LIDAR and by the DLR Falcon Aircraft. This information was used to elaborate the working hypotheses for the MECAPIP project in 1986.

This document presents the results of the projects that followed and the evidence obtained to date. The most significant characteristics of the atmospheric circulations in the Western Mediterranean Basin are: (1) the deep and narrow vertical exchanges over some of the mountain ranges, which produce stratified layers of pollutants over the sea at varying heights and degrees of aging, (2) the slow and persistent subsidence of these layers over the sea, and (3) the self-organization of the local flows at the regional level. The end results are vertical recirculations and the long residence time of air pollutants, which favours chemical reactions.

Scientific acceptance of the atmospheric processes in this region, however, has been slow in maturing as it has had to overcome the accepted level of knowhow dominated by mid latitude meteorology. This situation is further complicated by the inability of current mesoscale meteorological models to fully simulate some of the observed processes, e.g. layering. The experimental fact is that in summer deep vertical exchange processes occur every day and for several consecutive months in Southern Europe, and we hope that the present collection of papers will help to clarify this situation.

The results reported herein have been used in various applied meteorology applications, e.g., analyses of torrential rains and forest-fire winds, and some of the resulting publications have also been included in the present anthology.

In preparing this collection, original reprints of the papers were scanned and subsequently revised to correct for artifacts introduced during the text-scanning process, e.g., extra dots, changed symbols. Some of these, may have slipped through, and the reader should be aware of this.

Finally, we would like to gratefully acknowledge the support of BANCAJA in making this publication possible.

Millán M. Millán, Ph.D.

Fundación CEAM

TABLE OF CONTENTS

9

25

37

53

67

81

87

93

113

125

147

157

169

187

COMPLEMENTARY RESULTS

203

217

235

253

BACKGROUND DOCUMENTS

271

281

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