In a first-ever study using ozone data collected by commercial aircraft, researchers from the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) at the University of Colorado Boulder found that levels of the pollutant in the lowest part of Earth’s atmosphere have increased across the Northern Hemisphere over the past 20 years. That’s even as tighter controls on emissions of ozone precursors have lowered ground-level ozone in some places, including North America and Europe…
In an open-access study published August21 in the journal Science Advances, the team found an overall increase in ozone levels above the Northern Hemisphere.
Abstract
Tropospheric ozone is an important greenhouse gas, is detrimental to human health and crop and ecosystem productivity, and controls the oxidizing capacity of the troposphere. Because of its high spatial and temporal variability and limited observations, quantifying net tropospheric ozone changes across the Northern Hemisphere on time scales of two decades had not been possible. Here, we show, using newly available observations from an extensive commercial aircraft monitoring network, that tropospheric ozone has increased above 11 regions of the Northern Hemisphere since the mid-1990s, consistent with the OMI/MLS satellite product. The net result of shifting anthropogenic ozone precursor emissions has led to an increase of ozone and its radiative forcing above all 11 study regions of the Northern Hemisphere, despite NOx emission reductions at midlatitudes.
“That’s a big deal because it means that as we try to limit our pollution locally, it might not work as well as we thought,” said Audrey Gaudel, a CIRES scientist working in the NOAA Chemical Sciences Laboratory and the study’s lead author…
In the so-called “lower troposphere,” which is closest to Earth’s surface, ozone has decreased above some mid-latitude regions, including Europe and the United States, where ozone precursor emissions have decreased.
The researchers found those reductions were offset by increases higher in the troposphere — with the net result being an overall ozone increase from the surface to 12 km… The model showed that increased emissions in the tropics were likely driving the observed increase of ozone in the Northern Hemisphere.
“ozone precursors” That would be Oxygen? I’m not sure that eliminating that from the troposphere would be prudent.
I thought we were suppose to worry about “The Ozone hole” (low Ozone ?)
When we start integrating EV charging stations into the mix on a broad scale won’t it make this worse?
Another “greenhouse” gas that is assumed/asserted/presumed to be progressive (i.e. monotonic) without progressive effects.
“The net result of shifting anthropogenic ozone precursor emissions has led to an increase of ozone”
Conveniently, no mention of increased natural ozone precursor emmissions (terpenes) from the increased greening of the N hemisphere over the past 2 decades.
OK then … the ozone in the higher troposphere doesn’t really have detrimental effects on anything, does it? So, it’s not pollution then, is it? So we don’t have to worry about it, do we?
“Ozone on the rise – suggests pollution controls aren’t ‘working as well as we thought’”
Suggests that pollution and the control thereof has nothing to do with atmospheric ozone.
Of course, there is always the possibility that the Montreal Protocols have forced the ozone to lower altitudes.
So is it enough to fix the “ozone hole” ? or too much ? or worse than we thought ? What caused these increased emissions in the tropics ? Numbers ? Or are there just more “ozone precursors” in common aircraft routes over 20 years of increased air traffic ?
If it’s the first ever study, how do they know that levels have been increasing for 20 years?
Maybe those are NOT “pollution controls” to begin with. Just asking for proof that they are.
Missing from the above article and the embedded abstract of the CIRES study article is HOW MUCH did the ozone increase? Let’s talk quantitatively here.
“In the troposphere near the Earth’s surface, the natural concentration of ozone is about 10 parts per billion (0.000001 percent).”—source: https://ozonewatch.gsfc.nasa.gov/facts/SH.html#:~:text=That%20may%20seem%20like%20a,per%20million%20(0.0015%20percent).
Did the CIRES study find an increase of, say, 0.1 ppb out of 10 ppb (in which case I ain’t worried) or is it something like 1 ppb out of 10 ppb (in which case I’m worried only slightly more)?
And then there is this: “. . . upper stratospheric ozone has increased since 2000 by 1‒3% per decade outside the polar regions.”—source: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40828-019-0082-7#:~:text=The%20Montreal%20Protocol%20and%20its%20subsequent%20Amendments%20and%20adjustments%20have,decade%20outside%20the%20polar%20regions. (see “Conclusions” section). Ozone is naturally produced in the stratosphere by solar ultraviolet radiation.
So, did the CIRES researchers take this fact into account and “normalize” the tropospheric ozone levels for possible increased diffusion/convection infiltration of increased ozone in the stratosphere?
As it stands right now, I’ll mark the CIRES study conclusion, as per headline of above article, as “alarmist”.
The major ozone precursor we are controlling from power plants is NOx. There has been a dramatic reduction in NOx emissions since SCRs (Selective Catalytic Reactors) began to the added to new and existing coal units and new gas units. So it looks like NOx emissions are not the control knob we thought it was. Hmmm…sound familiar?
Hmmmm…. Mesured by high altitude aircraft that follow the same routes, day after day. How much ozone is produced in/by aircraft exhaust?
Good idea to understand things before tinkering with them.
So increased ozone is bad, except in the Antarctic decreased ozone is bad. Ozone can’t win.
I thought the concern about ozone was its depletion rather than accretion (we were all going to die of an increase in UV energy due to the ozone ‘hole’). It’s now described as a pollutant. What did I miss?
Ohhhh Nooooooes! Now oxygen is trying to kill us!
The Climate Chicken Little’s Mantra: “It’s all bad…. and getting worse.”
To all the Chicken Littles out there: This is interesting new data. We don’t know what it means yet. As O3 is a ‘potent’ ultraviolet radiation absorber (dissociating O3 +UV —> O2 +O), it may provide some beneficial effects in lower ‘sun burns’ and skin cancers over time.
Try to control your automatic negative thoughts, irrational fears, and megaphone mouths, please! How about accentuating the positive, for a climate change?
Ella Fitzgerald – Accentuate The Positive
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJI7kc6s0l4&w=560&h=315%5D
Sounds like there are more important variables that they need to discover and quantify. The model appears to be incomplete, or there is a big hole in their data.
Right! Over 50% of hydrocarbons are from plant life.
Of course it’s rising – the stuff that gets rid of it is disappearing.
That ‘stuff’ being volatile organics produced by (mostly perennial) plants.
That is their smell/scent. It’s why they make it, to scavenge low level ozone before it attacks them.
Annual plants (wheat, corn, rice etc) don’t create any where near the ‘stink’ that a coniferous forest does.
Because it takes a lot of energy and ‘resource’ to make those scents – annual plants simply haven’t got the time and in any case, are h3ll bent on producing a many viable seeds as they can.
The rise in low level ozone will track the decline of the perennials and correspond perfectly to the rise of CO2
It’s called Soil Erosion and it will trash our civilisation as surely as it trashed *every* previous attempt at same
No, Climate Change did not wipe them all out. They destroyed the plants first and *that* changed The Climate
Exactly as is happening now and this story is just one more little piece to the jigsaw
The ongoing misadventure of the 3 Gorges dam is another. The Yellow River was previously the ‘Great River’ (rough translation of Mississippi if I’m not wrong) an was renamed because of ’tillage’.
i.e Intensive farming.
The flooding rains (and yellow colour) are caused by rapid run-off from eroded farmland -not Climate Change
Yawn.
1 – pick a natural substance
2 – measure it
3 – claim that it’s increasing/decreasing/dangerously static
4 – ?
5 – profit
(where ? = apply for a grant)
Actually, it’s worse than that. These are not entrepreneurs looking for a profit. They are a bureaucracy of researchers whose mortgages, careers and families depend on those grants. So they will fight very hard for them, and won’t go away when you make it less profitable…
These guys have got the message to pound out the BS to keep focusing on a crisis by 2030. They don’t seem to get a message for themselves in this ‘worse than we thought’ chorus across all climate topics that all their efforts have really been to no avail.
Ya see, this is data that tells you your climate theory is completely wrong. It’s a rain dance. Maybe shutting industry down for 7 months was negative for the environment. Maybe windmill generators and solar panels operating from zero to too much every day, with nat gas gens spinning up and down, blackouts, charging California EVs… makes a lot of ozone.
Hey, let’s control EVERYTHING!.
This is a nonsensical two paragraphs.
1. The amount of ozone in the lower troposphere has decreased – offset by increases higher in the troposphere – OK. However, ‘ with the net result being an overall ozone increase from the surface to 12 km is untrue the result cannot be an increase at the surface; the result was lower ozone at the surface and an increase in the higher troposphere. Averaging these ozone amounts at the different levels is incorrect.
2. Increased emissions in the tropics were driving the increase in the Northern Hemisphere. So the source cannot be industry or other controlled emission sources. The increased emissions appear to be botanical or from the measuring aircraft themselves.
The metrics may be distorted by the aircraft with measuring equipment flying in the exhaust plumes of the aircraft ahead on the same fixed route. At high altitude at and above the tropopause the UV strength may be sufficient to convert precursors to O3.
As a verification the team should do some balloon ascent ozone measurements in areas where there are no busy aircraft routes within say 100 miles upwind of the balloon launch site