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Ozone trends and their relationship to characteristic weather patterns

Journal of Exposure Science & Environmental Epidemiology volume 25, pages 532–542 (2015)Cite this article

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Abstract

Local trends in ozone concentration may differ by meteorological conditions. Furthermore, the trends occurring at the extremes of the Ozone distribution are often not reported even though these may be very different than the trend observed at the mean or median and they may be more relevant to health outcomes. Classify days of observation over a 16-year period into broad categories that capture salient daily local weather characteristics. Determine the rate of change in mean and median O3 concentrations within these different categories to assess how concentration trends are impacted by daily weather. Further examine if trends vary for observations in the extremes of the O3 distribution. We used k-means clustering to categorize days of observation based on the maximum daily temperature, standard deviation of daily temperature, mean daily ground level wind speed, mean daily water vapor pressure and mean daily sea-level barometric pressure. The five cluster solution was determined to be the appropriate one based on cluster diagnostics and cluster interpretability. Trends in cluster frequency and pollution trends within clusters were modeled using Poisson regression with penalized splines as well as quantile regression. There were five characteristic groupings identified. The frequency of days with large standard deviations in hourly temperature decreased over the observation period, whereas the frequency of warmer days with smaller deviations in temperature increased. O3 trends were significantly different within the different weather groupings. Furthermore, the rate of O3 change for the 95th percentile and 5th percentile was significantly different than the rate of change of the median for several of the weather categories.We found that O3 trends vary between different characteristic local weather patterns. O3 trends were significantly different between the different weather groupings suggesting an important interaction between changes in prevailing weather conditions and O3 concentration.

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Acknowledgements

This publication was made possible by USEPA grant 834798. Its contents are solely the responsibility of the grantee and do not necessarily represent the official views of the USEPA. Further, USEPA does not endorse the purchase of any commercial products or services mentioned in the publication.

Research reported in this publication was supported by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences of the National Institutes of Health under award number T32ES015459, NIEHS 1R21ES020194 and PPG NIEHS P01 ES009825. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Environmental Health, Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, Massachusetts, USA

    Elena Austin, Antonella Zanobetti, Joel Schwartz, Diane R Gold & Petros Koutrakis

  2. Department of Environmental and Occupational Health, University of Washington School of Public Health, Seattle, Washington, USA

    Elena Austin

  3. Department of Biostatistics, Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, Massachusetts, USA

    Brent Coull

  4. Department of Medicine, Channing Laboratory, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts, USA

    Joel Schwartz & Diane R Gold

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  1. Elena Austin
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Correspondence to Elena Austin.

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Austin, E., Zanobetti, A., Coull, B. et al. Ozone trends and their relationship to characteristic weather patterns. J Expo Sci Environ Epidemiol 25, 532–542 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/jes.2014.45

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