Insight into ozone profile climatology over northeast China from aircraft measurement and numerical simulation

Tropospheric ozone is a major pollutant that can harm human health, animals and plants. With a rapid development in Northeast China, ozone pollution has become an increasingly serious environmental challenge. To study the ozone distribution and the potential sources of ozone precursors in Northeast China, we analyzed vertical ozone profiles from the In-service Aircraft for a Global Observing System (IAGOS) in 2012-2014 and provided the climatological vertical structure of tropospheric ozone over Shenyang. The tropospheric ozone generally presents high in hot months, mainly due to the combined effects of the strong solar radiation and high volatile organic compounds emission in summer. While in cold months, the ozone is low because of weak solar radiation and high nitrogen oxides emission. Besides, a low-ozone center exists within lower troposphere in August, which is mainly caused by the East Asian summer monsoon prevailing in summer. To analyze the sources of ozone, typical ozone pollution episodes were studied and the results revealed the different pathways for the enhancement of ozone pollution in Shenyang: regional transport of anthropogenic emissions from North China Plain (NCP), long-range transport from Siberian biomass burning and local photochemical production. Modeling results show that the largest contribution to the surface ozone in Northeast China is local anthropogenic emissions (exceed 90%); the regional transport of NCP anthropogenic emissions contribute more to the pollutants around 2 km, and account for more than 50% pollutants during highly ozone polluted days; through long-range transport, Siberian biomass burning in the spring also have a nonnegligible effect on the near-ground ozone in Northeast China. Overall, this study provides tropospheric ozone climatology and its source attribution in Northeast China, and highlight the great importance of regional transport of anthropogenic and biomass burning emissions in ozone pollution.

Quantifying the Impact of Atmospheric Transport Uncertainty on CO2 Surface Flux Estimates

We show that transport differences between two commonly used global chemical transport models, GEOS-Chem and TM5, lead to systematic space-time differences in modeled distributions of carbon dioxide and sulfur hexafluoride. The distribution of differences suggests inconsistencies between the transport simulated by the models, most likely due to the representation of vertical motion. We further demonstrate that these transport differences result in systematic differences in surface CO2 flux estimated by a collection of global atmospheric inverse models using TM5 and GEOS-Chem and constrained by in situ and satellite observations. While the impact on inferred surface fluxes is most easily illustrated in the magnitude of the seasonal cycle of surface CO2 exchange, it is the annual carbon budgets that are particularly relevant for carbon cycle science and policy. We show that inverse model flux estimates for large zonal bands can have systematic biases of up to 1.7 PgC/year due to large-scale transport uncertainty. These uncertainties will propagate directly into analysis of the annual meridional CO2 flux gradient between the tropics and northern midlatitudes, a key metric for understanding the location, and more importantly the processes, responsible for the annual global carbon sink. The research suggests that variability among transport models remains the largest source of uncertainty across global flux inversion systems and highlights the importance both of using model ensembles and of using independent constraints to evaluate simulated transport.