Impact of Local and Non-local Sources of Pollution on Background US ozone: Potential Role of the Atmospheric Composition Constellation of Geostationary Sounders

Abstract:

Dramatic changes in the global distribution of emissions over the last decade have fundamentally altered source-receptor pollution impacts. The projected deployment of the European Space Agency Sentinel 4, Korean Geostationary Environment Monitoring Spectrometer (GEMS), National Aeronautics and Space Administration Geostationary GEOstationary Coastal and Air Pollution Events (GEO-CAPE) and Tropospheric Emissions: Monitoring of Pollution (TEMPO) sounders provides a unique opportunity to quantify the current and future trajectory of emissions and their impact on global pollution. We examine the potential of this constellation of air quality sounders to quantify the role of local and non-local sources of pollution on background ozone in the US. Based upon an adjoint sensitivity method, we compute the role of synoptic scale transport of spatially-resolved non-US pollution on US background ozone over months representative of different source-receptor relationships. This analysis allows us to compute potential emission trajectories of megacities, e.g. Beijing, or regions, e.g., western China, on downwind ozone. We subsequently explore how reductions of emission uncertainties from constellation observations could improve attribution of local versus non-local contributors to US background ozone. These results show how this unprecedented new international ozone observing system can monitor the changing structure of emissions and their impact on global pollution.