ACPD Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics Discussions ACPD 1680-7375 Copernicus GmbH Göttingen, Germany 10.5194/acpd-5-863-2005 A 2003 stratospheric aerosol extinction and PSC climatology from GOMOS measurements on Envisat Vanhellemont F. 1 Fussen D. 1 Bingen C. 1 Kyrölä E. 2 Tamminen J. 2 Sofieva V. 2 Hassinen S. 2 Verronen P. 2 Seppälä A. 2 Bertaux J. L. 3 Hauchecorne A. 3 Dalaudier F. 3 Fanton d’Andon O. 4 Barrot G. 4 Mangin A. 4 Theodore B. 4 Guirlet M. 4 Renard J. B. 5 Fraisse R. 6 Snoeij P. 7 Koopman R. 8 Saavedra L. 8 Belgian Institute for Space Aeronomy, Brussels, Belgium Finnish Meteorological Institute, Earth Observation, Helsinki, Finland Service d’Aéronomie du CNRS, Verrieres-le-Buisson cedex, France ACRI-ST, Sophia-Antipolis, France CNRS-LPCE, Orléans, France Astrium SAS, Toulouse cedex, France ESTEC (ESA), Noordwijk, The Netherlands ESRIN (ESA), Frascati, Italy 16 02 2005 5 1 863 874 This is an open-access article ditributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. This article is available from http://www.atmos-chem-phys-discuss.net/5/863/2005/acpd-5-863-2005.html The full text article is available as a PDF file from http://www.atmos-chem-phys-discuss.net/5/863/2005/acpd-5-863-2005.pdf

Stratospheric aerosols play an important role in a number of atmospheric issues such as midlatitude ozone depletion, atmospheric dynamics and the Earth radiative budget. Polar stratospheric clouds on the other hand are a crucial factor in the yearly Arctic 5 and Antarctic ozone depletion. It is therefore important to quantify the stratospheric aerosol/PSC abundance. In orbit since March 2002, the GOMOS instrument onboard the European Envisat satellite has provided a vast aerosol extinction data set. In this paper we present an aerosol/PSC climatology that was constructed from this data set, together with a discussion of the results.