We prove that the nonlinear Fourier transform of the Benjamin-Ono equation on \(\mathbb {T}\) , also referred to as Birkhoff map, is a real analytic diffeomorphism from the scale of Sobolev spaces \(H^{s}_{0}(\mathbb {T}, \mathbb {R})\) , \(s > -1/2\) , to the scale of weighted \(\ell ^2-\) sequence spaces, \(\mathfrak {h}^{s +1/2}_{r,0}(\mathbb N, \mathbb {C})\) , \(s >-1/2\) . As an application we show that for any \(-1/2<s<0\) , the flow map of the Benjamin-Ono equation \(\mathcal {S}_0^t : H^{s}_{0}(\mathbb {T}, \mathbb {R})\rightarrow H^{s}_{0}(\mathbb {T}, \mathbb {R})\) is nowhere locally uniformly continuous in \(H^{s}_{0}(\mathbb {T}, \mathbb {R})\) .