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Report

Discounting the effect of meteorology on trends in surface ozone: Development of statistical tools

Solberg, Sverre; Walker, Sam-Erik; Schneider, Philipp; Guerreiro, Cristina de Brito Beirao; Colette, Augustin

Publication details

Series: ETC/ACM Technical Paper 2017/15

Publisher: ETC/ACM

Year: 2018

Fulltekst: acm.eionet.europa.eu/reports/ETCACM_TP_2017_15_discount_meteo_on_O3_trends

Summary:
This report presents the results using a statistical method to single out the influence of interannual meteorological variability on surface ozone. The reason for using such a tool is two-fold: Firstly, to explain the ozone levels in one specific year in terms of weather anomalies and secondly, to estimate the part of long-term ozone trends that is due to the meteorology alone. The method is a so-called GAM (generalized additive model), which could be regarded an advanced multiple regression method relating daily ozone levels to certain meteorological variables. The performance of the method was evaluated by comparing observed ozone data with those predicted by the GAM. This revealed a good to very good agreement in central Europe and Germany in particular. For southern Europe the performance was poorer. The method indicated that meteorology contributed to the downward trend in ozone seen at most sites for both 1990-2000 and 2000-2010.