ANCISTRUS Software validated

Effective velocity vectors of the middle atmospheric meridional circulation for March-April 2005. These circulation vectors were inferred from MIPAS measurements of long-lived tracers by inversion of the 2D continuity equation. For purposes of validation, the inverse model ANCISTRUS underwent elaborate tests .

The ANCISTRUS method (von Clarmann and Grabowski, 2016) was characterized by numerous tests. The following questions were tackled:

1. To which degree do the sink-advection balance and pattern displacement contribute to the total information exploited by ANCISTRUS?
2. To which degree do the ANCISTRUS results depend on the regularization strength chosen?
3. Which species contribute most information to the ANCISTRUS results, and how sensitive are ANCISTRUS results with respect to the disregard of each species?
4. Can ANCISTRUS recover circulation fields from simulated trace gas distributions?

All results indicate that ANCISTRUS is fit for purpose.

The test results are published in Atmos. Chem. Phys.