The residual mean circulation (RMC) formulation of zonally averaged transport in the middle atmosphere produces a circulation which depends on the distributions of net diabatic heating and temperature. We have derived such circulations from two temperature data sets, National Meteorological Center (NMC) and Limb Infrared Monitor of the Stratosphere (LIMS), using the same radiative transfer code (Rosenfield et al., 1987). We have used these circulations to transport N2O in a photochemical model. The circulations and the resulting N2O distributions are notably different during the northern hemisphere winter, with that based on the NMC temperatures producing too much upward transport in the tropical stratosphere as judged by comparison with the stratospheric and mesoscale sounder data. The experiment demonstrates that model calculations, in general, and perturbation assessments, in particular, are likely to be quite sensitive to the choice of input temperature data (where this is not computed self‐consistently). It also reveals what appears to be a seasonally dependent bias in NMC zonally averaged temperatures with respect to those obtained from the LIMS instrument during 1978/197