On the Importance of Reliable Background Concentrations of Ozone for Regional Scale Photochemical Modelling

Ozone throughout the troposphere is subject of significant temporal and spatial variability due to photochemical production in the planetary boundary layer and free troposphere, stratospheric intrusions, convective events and long range transport. However, high resolving observations of ozone in the troposphere are generally rare today. That is of special disadvantage for limited area models, which represent mathematically a differential equation system with an initial and boundary problem. As ozone concentrations usually increase from the earth surface to the stratosphere, a proper choice of the background ozone concentrations is necessary to reproduce or even predict the amount and distribution of ozone in a specific region of interest. In this paper the impact of background concentrations of ozone on regional scale model results is analysed during a summer smog episode over Europe. For this purpose ozone is artificially partitioned into individual categories. For each category, transport and chemical transformation is calculated separately. Initial and boundary concentrations of ozone dominate total ozone concentrations increasingly with height. But also in the planetary boundary layer they contribute with more than 30% to the total ozone changes and are therefore far from being negligible. Moderately modified assumptions of background ozone concentrations reveal an uncertainty of near surface ozone concentrations of 5-15% depending on the weather situation