Global distribution and trends of tropospheric ozone: An observation-based review
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Cooper, O. R., D. D. Parrish, J. Ziemke, N. V. Balashov, M. Cupeiro, I. E. Galbally, S. Gilge, et al. “Global Distribution and Trends of Tropospheric Ozone: An Observation-Based Review.” Edited by Detlev Helmig and Paul Palmer. Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene 2 (July 10, 2014): 000029. https://doi.org/10.12952/journal.elementa.000029.
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This work was written as part of one of the author's official duties as an Employee of the United States Government and is therefore a work of the United States Government. In accordance with 17 U.S.C. 105, no copyright protection is available for such works under U.S. Law.
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Abstract
Tropospheric 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.