Spatial Resolved Surface Ozone with Urban and Rural Differentiation during 1990–2019: A Space–Time Bayesian Neural Network Downscaler

Long-term exposure to ambient ozone (O 3 ) can lead to a series of chronic diseases and associated premature deaths, and thus population-level environmental health studies hanker after the high-resolution surface O 3 concentration database. In response to this demand, we innovatively construct a space–time Bayesian neural network parametric regressor to fuse TOAR historical observations, CMIP6 multimodel simulation ensemble, population distributions, land cover properties, and emission inventories altogether and downscale to 10 km × 10 km spatial resolution with high methodological reliability ( R 2 = 0.89–0.97, RMSE = 1.97–3.42 ppbV), fair prediction accuracy ( R 2 = 0.69–0.77, RMSE = 5.63–7.97 ppbV), and commendable spatiotemporal extrapolation capabilities ( R 2 = 0.62–0.76, RMSE = 5.38–11.7 ppbV). Based on our predictions in 8-h maximum daily average metric, the rural-site surface O 3 are 15.1±7.4 ppbV higher than urban globally averaged across 30 historical years during 1990–2019, with developing countries being of the most evident differences. The globe-wide urban surface O 3 are climbing by 1.9±2.3 ppbV per decade, except for the decreasing trends in eastern United States. On the other hand, the global rural surface O 3 tend to be relatively stable, except for the rising tendencies in China and India. Using CMIP6 model simulations directly without urban–rural differentiation will lead to underestimations of population O 3 exposure by 2.0±0.8 ppbV averaged over each historical year. Our original Bayesian neural network framework contributes to the deep-learning-driven environmental studies methodologically by providing a brand-new feasible way to realize data fusion and downscaling, which maintains high interpretability by conforming to the principles of spatial statistics without compromising the prediction accuracy. Moreover, the 30-year highly spatial resolved monthly surface O 3 database with multiple metrics fills in the literature gap for long-term surface O 3 exposure tracing.