1-year data sets of monthly averaged nitrous oxide (N 2 O) and ozone (O 3) derived from satellite measurements were used as a tool for the evaluation of atmospheric pho-tochemical models. Two 1-year data sets, one solar occulta-tion data set derived from the Improved Limb Atmospheric Spectrometer (ILAS and ILAS-II) and one limb sounding data set derived from the Odin Sub-Millimetre Radiome-ter (Odin/SMR) were employed. Here, these data sets are used for the evaluation of two Chemical Transport Models (CTMs), the Karlsruhe Simulation Model of the Middle At-mosphere (KASIMA) and the Chemical Lagrangian Model of the Stratosphere (CLaMS) as well as for one Chemistry-Climate Model (CCM), the atmospheric chemistry general circulation model ECHAM5/MESSy1 (E5M1) in the lower stratosphere with focus on the Northern Hemisphere. Since the Odin/SMR measurements cover the entire hemisphere, the evaluation is performed for the entire hemisphere as well as for the low latitudes, midlatitudes and high latitudes using the Odin/SMR 1-year data set as reference. To assess the im-pact of using different data sets for such an evaluation study we repeat the evaluation for the polar lower stratosphere us-ing the ILAS/ILAS-II data set. Only small differences were found using ILAS/ILAS-II instead of Odin/SMR as a refer-ence, thus, showing that the results are not influenced by the particular satellite data set used for the evaluation. The evalu-Correspondence to: F. Khosrawi (farah@misu.su.se) ation of CLaMS, KASIMA and E5M1 shows that all models are in agreement with Odin/SMR and ILAS/ILAS-II. Dif-ferences are generally in the range of ±20%. Larger differ-ences (up to −40%) are found in all models at 500±25 K for N 2 O mixing ratios greater than 200 ppbv, thus in air masses of tropical character. Generally, the largest differences were found for the tropics and the lowest for the polar regions. However, an underestimation of polar winter ozone loss was found both in KASIMA and E5M1 both in the Northern and Southern Hemisphere.