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Ozone is both a major air pollutant with known adverse health effects and a greenhouse gas that traps heat from escaping Earth's atmosphere. Scientists and policy analysts are interested in learning how curbing the emissions of these chemicals can improve human health and also help mitigate climate change.
Research scientists Kevin Bowman of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., and Daven Henze of the University of Colorado, Boulder, set out to quantify, down to areas the size of large metropolitan regions, how the climate-altering impacts of these chemical emissions vary around the world. The chemicals, which are produced from sources such as planes, factories and automobiles, are converted to ozone in the presence of sunlight and subsequently transported by wind around our planet. Among these chemicals are nitrogen dioxide, carbon monoxide and non-methane hydrocarbons.
By combining satellite observations of how much heat ozone absorbs in Earth's atmosphere with a model of how chemicals are transported in the atmosphere, the researchers discovered significant regional variability - in some places by more than a factor of 10 -- in how efficiently ozone trapped heat in Earth's atmosphere, depending upon where the ozone-forming chemical emissions were located. This variability was found within
