Lifetimes and timescales of tropospheric ozone

The lifetime of tropospheric O3 is difficult to quantify because we model O3 as a secondary pollutant, without direct emissions. For other reactive greenhouse gases like CH4 and N2O, we readily model lifetimes and timescales that include chemical feedbacks based on direct emissions. Here, we devise a set of artificial experiments with a chemistry-transport model where O3 is directly emitted into the atmosphere at a quantified rate. We create 3 primary emission patterns for O3, mimicking secondary production by surface industrial pollution, that by aviation, and primary injection through stratosphere–troposphere exchange (STE). The perturbation lifetimes for these O3 sources includes chemical feedbacks and varies from 6 to 27 days depending on source location and season. Previous studies derived lifetimes around 24 days estimated from the mean odd-oxygen loss frequency. The timescales for decay of excess O3 varies from 10 to 20 days in northern hemisphere summer to 30 to 40 days in northern hemisphere winter. For each season, we identify a single O3 chemical mode applying to all experiments. Understanding how O3 sources accumulate (the lifetime) and disperse (decay timescale) provides some insight into how changes in pollution emissions, climate, and stratospheric O3 depletion over this century will alter tropospheric O3. This work incidentally found 2 distinct mistakes in how we diagnose tropospheric O3, but not how we model it. First, the chemical pattern of an O3 perturbation or decay mode does not resemble our traditional view of the odd-oxygen family of species that includes NO2. Instead, a positive O3 perturbation is accompanied by a decrease in NO2. Second, heretofore we diagnosed the importance of STE flux to tropospheric O3 with a synthetic “tagged” tracer O3S, which had full stratospheric chemistry and linear tropospheric loss based on odd-oxygen loss rates. These O3S studies predicted that about 40% of tropospheric O3 was of stratospheric origin, but our lifetime and decay experiments show clearly that STE fluxes add about 8% to tropospheric O3, providing further evidence that tagged tracers do not work when the tracer is a major species with chemical feedbacks on its loss rates, as shown previously for CH4.