Fifty years of balloon-borne ozone profile measurements at Uccle, Belgium: a short history, the scientific relevance, and the achievements in understanding the vertical ozone distribution

Starting in 1969 and comprising three launches a week, the Uccle (Brussels, Belgium) ozonesonde dataset is one of longest and densest in the world. Moreover, as the only major change was the switch from Brewer-Mast (BM) to electrochemical concentration cell (ECC) ozonesonde types in 1997 (when the emissions of ozone-depleting substances peaked), the Uccle time series is very homogenous. In this paper, we briefly describe the efforts that were undertaken during the first 3 decades of the 50 years of ozonesonde observations to guarantee the homogeneity between ascent and descent profiles, under... Mehr ...