Abstract
AbstractTropospheric ozone plays a major role in Earth’s atmospheric chemistry processes and also acts as an air pollutant and greenhouse gas. Due to its short lifetime, and dependence on sunlight and precursor emissions from natural and anthropogenic sources, tropospheric ozone’s abundance is highly variable in space and time on seasonal, interannual and decadal time-scales. Recent, and sometimes rapid, changes in observed ozone mixing ratios and ozone precursor emissions inspired us to produce this up-to-date overview of tropospheric ozone’s global distribution and trends. Much of the text is a synthesis of in situ and remotely sensed ozone observations reported in the peer-reviewed literature, but we also include some new and extended analyses using well-known and referenced datasets to draw connections between ozone trends and distributions in different regions of the world. In addition, we provide a brief evaluation of the accuracy of rural or remote surface ozone trends calculated by three state-of-the-science chemistry-climate models, the tools used by scientists to fill the gaps in our knowledge of global tropospheric ozone distribution and trends.
Highlights
Tropospheric ozone is a short-lived trace gas that either originates naturally in the stratosphere ( Junge, 1962; Danielsen, 1968; Stohl et al, 2003) or is produced in situ by photochemical reactions involving sunlight and ozone precursor gases including nitrogen oxides (NOx) and non-methane volatile organic compounds, methane (CH4) or carbon monoxide (The Royal Society, 2008; Monks et al, 2009)
We provide a brief evaluation of the accuracy of rural or remote surface ozone trends calculated by three state-of-the-science chemistry-climate models, the tools used by scientists to fill the gaps in our knowledge of global tropospheric ozone distribution and trends
Compared to Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI)/Microwave Limb Sounder (MLS) TCO the ACCMIP ensemble mean tropospheric column ozone is biased low by only 1%, individual model biases range from -16% to +13%
Summary
Tropospheric ozone is a short-lived trace gas that either originates naturally in the stratosphere ( Junge, 1962; Danielsen, 1968; Stohl et al, 2003) or is produced in situ by photochemical reactions involving sunlight and ozone precursor gases including nitrogen oxides (NOx) and non-methane volatile organic compounds, methane (CH4) or carbon monoxide (The Royal Society, 2008; Monks et al, 2009). These precursors originate from natural sources including wildfires, biogenic hydrocarbon emissions, lightning NOx, and biogenic NOx emitted from soils, and from anthropogenic fossil fuel and biofuel combustion, or crop burning. The end result is a more thorough assessment of our current understanding of the distribution and trends of tropospheric ozone
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