Strong planetary wave activity enhanced by the external forcing of a persisting anticyclone system can cause large total ozone zonal deviations. In January 1992 such a situation was observed with a high-pressure system and associated low total ozone concentrations situated over Northern Europe. In this article, measurements from the total ozone mapping spectrometer (TOMS) are analyzed with a simple model based on the linearized stationary ozone continuity equation. It is shown that in such a meteorological situation, vertical advection of ozone caused by the wavenumber-one quasi-stationary planetary wave is the most important monthly mean transport mechanism. This is different from the climatological situation, where horizontal and vertical advection are almost equally important and where wavenumbers two and three contribute more to the total ozone zonal deviations. The dominance of vertical motions, which are in phase throughout the lower and middle stratosphere, also explains the high correlations found between temperatures at 50 hPa from National Meteorological Center analyses and total ozone. Under these special meteorological conditions, the high planetary wave activity is responsible for total ozone columns with about 60 Dobson units less ozone over the anticyclonic region than under normal conditions. ¿ American Geophysical Union 1996