The goal of the international IPY Activity entitled The Structure and Evolution of the Polar Stratosphere and Mesosphere
and Links to the Troposphere during IPY, (IPY Activity No. 217) is to document the dynamics, chemistry and microphysical
processes within the polar vortices during IPY, with a focus on the stratosphere-troposphere and
stratosphere-mesosphere coupling.One of the key outcomes will be a collection of analysis products from several
operational centres and several research centres, which will be archived at the
SPARC Data Center (See Table). The analysis products will cover the period of IPY (March 2007 to March 2009) and
will represent the best available self-consistent approximations to the state
of the atmosphere during this period. Some satellite products will also be available for comparison with the
analyses, and we are working on activating links with other IPY activities such as POLARCAT (IPY Activity No. 32) ,
PANSY(IPY Activity No. 9) , and ORACLE-O3 (IPY Activity No. 99 ) , and other related activities such as ACCENT
(Atmospheric Composition Change the European Network of Excellence). The specialized observations and field campaigns associated with these other activities will
complement the data assimilation products and provide validation opportunities.
Ensuring that the links with these other activities are established, maintained,
and utilized will be the responsibility of Dr Elham Farahani who has recently
been hired as the SPARC-IPY coordination scientist.
The analysis data will be available through the SPARC Data Centre. Registration on the web site is
required. Data will be available in GRIB and netCDF formats depending on the centre providing the data, and Climate Data
Operators (cdo) will be available for quick access of the data, and for conversion to other data formats.The
web site is undergoing testing and will be available in the near future. The
contributing centres and current status of the data acquisition process is
summarized in the table below.
