New study: Ozone levels higher across China than in other countries tracking the air pollutant.
In China, people breathe air thick with the lung-damaging pollutant ozone two to six times more often than people in the United States, Europe, Japan, or South Korea, according to a new assessment. By one metric—total number of days with daily maximum average ozone values (8-hour average) greater than 70 ppb—China had twice as many high ozone days as Japan and South Korea, three times more than the United States, and six times more than Europe.
“We find that in the most populous urban regions of Eastern and Central China, there are more than 60 days in a calendar year with surface ozone levels exceeding the Chinese national ozone air quality standard,” said Lin Zhang of Peking University, lead author of the study in the current issue of Environmental Science & Technology Letters.
“China has become a hot spot of present-day surface ozone pollution,” said Owen Cooper, a co-author on the research paper and a CIRES scientist working in NOAA’s Chemical Sciences Division. “Human and vegetation exposure in China is greater than in other developed regions of the world with comprehensive ozone monitoring.”
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