Rapid O₃ assimilations – Part 2: Tropospheric O₃ changes accompanied by declining NO_x emissions in the USA and Europe in 2005–2020

Abstract

Abstract. Tropospheric nitrogen dioxide (NO2) concentrations have declined dramatically over the United States (USA) and Europe in recent decades. Here we investigate the changes in surface and free-tropospheric O3 accompanied by NO2 changes over the USA and Europe in 2005–2020 by assimilating the Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI) and U.S. Air Quality System (AQS) and European AirBase network O3 observations. The assimilated O3 concentrations demonstrate good agreement with O3 observations. Surface O3 concentrations are 41.4, 39.5, and 39.5 ppb (parts per billion; USA) and 35.3, 32.0, and 31.6 ppb (Europe) and tropospheric O3 columns are 35.5, 37.0, and 36.8 DU (USA) and 32.8, 35.3, and 36.4 DU (Europe) in the simulations, assimilations, and observations, respectively. We find overestimated summertime surface O3 concentrations over the USA and Europe, which resulted in a surface O3 maximum in July–August in the simulations, which is in contrast to April in the observations. Furthermore, our analysis exhibits limited changes in surface O3 concentrations; i.e., they decreased by −6 % over the USA and increased by 1.5 % over Europe in 2005–2020. The surface observation-based assimilations suggest insignificant changes in tropospheric O3 columns, namely −3.0 % (USA) and 1.5 % (Europe) in 2005–2020. While the OMI-based assimilations exhibit larger decreases in tropospheric O3 columns, with −12.0 % (USA) and −15.0 % (Europe) in 2005–2020, the decreases mainly occurred in 2010–2014, corresponding to the reported slower decline in free-tropospheric NO2 since 2010. Our analysis thus suggests that there are limited impacts of the decline in local emissions on tropospheric O3 over the USA and Europe and advises more efforts to evaluate the possible contributions of natural sources and transport. The discrepancy in assimilated tropospheric O3 columns further indicates the possible uncertainties in the derived tropospheric O3 changes.

The Capability of Deep Learning Model to Predict Ozone Across Continents in China, the United States and Europe

“…The lower correlation coefficient of the DL predictions over Europe in the summer could be associated with the different summertime surface O 3 variabilities between China and Europe. As exhibited by recent studies (R. Zhu et al, 2023aZhu et al, , 2023b, surface MDA8 O 3 in June-July is lower than that in May and August in eastern China except in the highly polluted North China Plain; however, surface MDA8 O 3 is broadly maximum in June-July over Europe. The high correlation coefficient in eastern China in the summer (0.99) may imply possible overfitting when the predicted results are extrapolated to Europe.…”

Data‐ and Model‐Based Urban O3 Responses to NOx Changes in China and the United States

“…However, the enhanced NO 2 concentrations have a weaker influence on the modeled urban O 3 evolution in the US (Figure 5), and the model-based O 3 chemical regimes still show a large discrepancy with the reported transitional or VOC-limited regimes in recent studies (H. He et al, 2020;Jin et al, 2020). In a recent study, Zhu et al (2023) suggests larger relative contributions of regional background O 3 to urban surface O 3 observations in the US than in China, which could be associated with the weaker influence of scaling NO x emissions. anthropogenic VOC emissions in 2015-2020.…”

“…In a recent study, Zhu et al. (2023) suggests larger relative contributions of regional background O 3 to urban surface O 3 observations in the US than in China, which could be associated with the weaker influence of scaling NO x emissions.…”