Vertical ozone distributions observed using tethered ozonesondes in a coastal industrial city, Kaohsiung, in southern Taiwan

This work presents the vertical distributions of ozone and meteorological parameters observed with tethered ozonesondes and meteorological radiosondes in the lower atmosphere during an ozone episode on March 25–27, 2003, in Kaohsiung City in southern Taiwan. Kaohsiung is a coastal industrial city with inland mountain ranges to the east. Extremely complicated ozone structures were identified that spanned day and night during the experimental period. During afternoons, the lower atmosphere was divided into two stratified air layers with substantially different ozone concentrations. On the episode day (March 26), average ozone concentration in the near-ground layer was 85 ppb and the aloft layer was 140 ppb. A very high ozone peak of 199 ppb measured aloft likely resulted from an elevated large point source. Several no-ozone air layers, distributed throughout 400–750 m, were observed to transport onshore during the nigh. As well, elevated ozone layers peaking at 60–90 ppb and 90–160 ppb were detected below and above the no-ozone air layers, respectively. These complicated ozone structures were likely formed through titration of plumes from large point sources and the circulations of sea breezes or combined sea-breeze/mountain flows in the study area.     

The impact of chemical lateral boundary conditions on CMAQ predictions of tropospheric ozone over the continental United States

A sensitivity study is performed to examine the impact of lateral boundary conditions (LBCs) on the NOAA-EPA operational Air Quality Forecast Guidance over continental USA. We examined six LBCS: the fixed profile LBC, three global LBCs, and two ozonesonde LBCs for summer 2006. The simulated results from these six runs are compared to IONS ozonesonde and surface ozone measurements from August 1 to 5, 2006. The choice of LBCs can affect the ozone prediction throughout the domain, and mainly influence the predictions in upper altitude or near inflow boundaries, such as the US west coast and the northern border. Statistical results shows that the use of global model predictions for LBCs could improve the correlation coefficients of surface ozone prediction over the US west coast, but could also increase the ozone mean bias in most regions of the domain depending on global models. In this study, the use of the MOZART (Model for Ozone And Related chemical Tracers) prediction for CMAQ (Community Multiscale Air Quality) LBC shows a better surface ozone prediction than that with fixed LBC, especially over the US west coast. The LBCs derived from ozonesonde measurements yielded better O₃ correlations in the upper troposphere.