Assessment of regional and interannual variations in tropospheric ozone in chemical reanalyses

Abstract. We evaluate regional and interannual variations in tropospheric ozone in five chemical reanalyses, consisting of the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service reanalysis (CAMSRA), the second-generation Tropospheric Chemistry Reanalysis (TCR-2), the GEOS-Chem reanalysis, the Community Multiscale Air Quality (CMAQ) regional analysis, and the Chinese air quality reanalysis (CAQRA). We find that there are large regional differences (about 10–15 nmol mol-1) in mean surface ozone between the reanalyses. GEOS-Chem has high ozone relative to the ensemble mean across most continental regions, whereas CAMSRA has low ozone. Comparison with surface ozone observations shows that the reanalyses are biased high relative to the observations, with surface ozone biases exceeding 10 nmol mol-1 in GEOS-Chem. We find that CAMSRA has the smallest bias with respect to the observations, with negative biases in Europe, and in the central and western US, and positive biases everywhere else. In the free troposphere the reanalyses are in good agreement, and the mean bias between the reanalyses and ozonesonde observations are small, less than 4 nmol mol-1 at 500 hPa. In addition, the correlations between the ozonesondes and the reanalyses are as high as 0.8 and 0.9 in the southern and northern midlatitudes respectively. The results suggest that chemical reanalyses should provide valuable information for quantifying variations in ozone in the free troposphere. However, to enhance the utility of the surface ozone analyses, improvements in the reanalyses are needed to better exploit assimilated observations to mitigate the impact of discrepancies in the model chemistry and ozone precursor emissions.