Analysis of the Summer 2004 ozone budget over the United States using Intercontinental Transport Experiment Ozonesonde Network Study (IONS) observations and Model of Ozone and Related Tracers (MOZART-4) simulations

The origin of ozone over the summertime contiguous United States during summer 2004 was examined using the Intercontinental Transport Experiment (INTEX-A) Ozonesonde Network Study (IONS-04) over North America. We estimate the budget using the global chemistry transport Model of Ozone and Related Tracers version 4 (MOZART-4) with synthetic tracers that keep track of the ozone produced from selected NO_x sources (stratosphere, lightning, anthropogenic, and biomass burning sources in Eurasia and the contiguous United States, and North American boreal fires). This "model budget" is analyzed in conjunction with results from a "laminar identification method" (LID), a more empirical approach to extracting information about contributions from ozone transported down from the stratosphere, advection, and convection. Both methods give comparable results for the contribution from stratospheric ozone, an average over all sites of 20 ± 7% for the LID budget and of 26 ± 6% for the model budget (the standard deviation gives the variability over the IONS sites). These results point toward the important contribution of downward transport of ozone from the stratosphere in assessing tropospheric ozone. The contributions for the other tracers are 25 ± 9% for U.S. sources, 13 ± 5% for Eurasian sources, 3 ± 2% for boreal fires and 10 ± 2% from lightning. In the boundary layer the dominant contribution generally comes from local (U.S.) sources. Eurasian sources can add up to 8% on average for some sites, lightning up to 4%, and North American boreal fires up to 10%. Variations in the tracer contributions across the different sites can be large, but the budget estimated by the model for the entire United States is similar to the budget averaged over the IONS-04 sites which lets us conclude that the sample of locations and launch days conveys a proper representation of the large-scale picture.