The Stratospheric and Mesospheric NOy in the 2002–2004 Polar Winters as measured by MIPAS/ENVISAT

The Michelson Interferometer for Passive Atmospheric Sounding (MIPAS) on board ENVISAT, provided global (pole-to-pole, the polar night winter regions) measurements of nearly all constituents of the NO_y family (including NO, NO₂, HNO₃ and H₂O₅) from July 2002 to the end of March 2004 from the upper stratosphere up to the middle mesosphere. The inter-annual variability of the NO₂ and HNO₃ abundances in the Arctic and Antarctic winters from September 2002 through March 2004 was enormous with tremendous hemispheric asymmetry and extraordinary values in two winters. The origin of these variations and of the extreme measured values has been analyzed on the basis of the changing atmospheric dynamics (using the CH₄ tracer) and solar activity, including the extraordinary solar protons events of Oct–Nov 2003.