Connections between summer air pollution and stagnation

Abstract

The body of literature on ambient air pollution suggests that atmospheric stagnation events trigger high levels of air pollution. In this paper we use fifteen years (2000–2014) of summertime in situ air quality measurements together with meteorological reanalysis data to examine the temporal correlation of pollutants with the Air Stagnation Index (ASI) on daily timescales. We find that while the direction of the relationship between the ASI and summertime PM2.5 and O3 ranges from near-zero to positive throughout regions comprising the contiguous United States (US), the strength of the relationship is very weak (e.g. in the Northeast the correlation coefficient between the ASI and PM2.5 is 0.09). Moreover, similar to our analysis of the correlation of day-to-day variations of the ASI and pollutants, the percentage of co-occurring extreme pollution and stagnation events is small (e.g. days with a high coverage of stagnation only co-occur with extreme pollution events about one-third of the time in the Northeast). The southern US is an exception to our overall findings as the strength of the relationship between the ASI and pollution is stronger and the percentage of co-occurring events is higher compared with other regions. The results of this study suggest a reevaluation of the ASI as an index to assess meteorological and climatic impacts to air quality.