Observational Evidence of Aerosol Radiation Modifying Photochemical Ozone Profiles in the Lower Troposphere

Abstract

Aerosol optical effects can trigger complex changes in solar shortwave radiation (SW) in the atmosphere, resulting in significant impacts on the photochemistry and vertical structure of ozone. This paper provides observational evidence of aerosol absorbing and scattering effects on modifying the SW and ozone profiles in the low troposphere. Using field vertical measurements and observation‐based model simulations, we demonstrated that absorbing aerosols decreased SW, resulting in substantial inhibition of ozone production throughout the boundary layer (BL). A similar inhibition effect occurred within the lower BL under sufficient scattering aerosols. However, the scattering augmentation effect played an additional role in enhancing the photolysis rate and promoting ozone generation in the upper BL. Hence, the observational evidence as well as our model simulations disentangled the radiative effects of different types of aerosols on the vertical structures of ozone.

Response of Surface Ozone to Atmospheric Aerosol Absorption is More Sensitive than to Scattering

“…There has been an increasing interest in studying the influence of atmospheric aerosols on tropospheric ozone and several research advances have been made over the last few decades (Meng et al, 1997;Pere et al, 2015;Zhu et al, 2021;Wang et al, 2022). Many studies have revealed that aerosols affect ozone by changing the photolysis frequency (Jacobson et al, 1998;Benas et al, 2013;Wang et al, 2019), some studies have quantified the impacts of absorbing aerosols on surface ozone (Li et al, 2005;Mok et al, 2016;An et al, 2021), and recent studies have compared the differences in the impacts of scattering and absorbing aerosols on ozone (Gao et al, 2022;Shi et al, 2022). Aerosols also absorb oxidative radicals, inhibit the formation of ozone in the troposphere (Jacob et al, 2000;Lou et al, 2014;Li et al, 2018), and influence ozone by altering atmospheric dynamics, that is, affect the evolution of the atmospheric boundary layer and the vertical exchange (Xing et al, 2017;Gao et al, 2020;Yang et al, 2021).…”

“…Some studies have attempted to investigate the influence of aerosol optical properties on ozone using observational data (Gharibzadehet al, 2021;Shao et al, 2022). A recent study compared the influence of scattering and absorbing aerosols on ozone (Shi et al, 2022).…”