An accurate description of the complicated shape of the potential energy surface (PES) and that of the highly excited vibration states is of crucial importance for various unsolved issues in the spectroscopy and dynamics of ozone and remains a challenge for the theory. In this work a new analytical representation is proposed for the PES of the ground electronic state of the ozone molecule in the range covering the main potential well and the transition state towards the dissociation. This model accounts for particular features specific to the ozone PES for large variations of nuclear displacements along the minimum energy path. The impact of the shape of the PES near the transition state (existence of the "reef structure") on vibration energy levels was studied for the first time. The major purpose of this work was to provide accurate theoretical predictions for ozone vibrational band centres at the energy range near the dissociation threshold, which would be helpful for understanding the very complicated high-resolution spectra and its analyses currently in progress. Extended ab initio electronic structure calculations were carried out enabling the determination of the parameters of a minimum energy path PES model resulting in a new set of theoretical vibrational levels of ozone. A comparison with recent high-resolution spectroscopic data on the vibrational levels gives the root-mean-square deviations below 1 cm(-1) for ozone band centres up to 90% of the dissociation energy. New ab initio vibrational predictions represent a significant improvement with respect to all previously available calculations.