COVID-19 induced lower-tropospheric ozone changes

Abstract

The recent COVID-19 pandemic with its countermeasures, e.g., lock-downs, resulted in decreases in emissions of various trace gases. Here we investigate the changes of ozone over Europe associated with these emission reductions using a coupled global/regional chemistry climate model. We conducted and analysed a business as usual (BAU) and a sensitivity (COVID19) simulation. A source apportionment (tagging) technique allows us to make a sector-wise attribution of these changes, e.g. to natural and anthropogenic sectors such as land transport. Our simulation results show a decrease of ozone of 8% over Europe in May 2020 due to the emission reductions. The simulated reductions are in line with observed changes in ground level ozone. The source apportionment results show that this decrease is mainly due to the decreased ozone precursors from anthropogenic origin. Further, our results show that the ozone reduction is much smaller than the reduction of the total NOx emissions (around 20 %), mainly caused by an increased ozone production efficiency. This means that more ozone is produced for each emitted NOx molecule. Hence, more ozone is formed from natural emissions and the ozone productivities of the remaining anthropogenic emissions increase. Our results show that politically induced emissions reductions cannot simply be transferred to ozone reductions, which needs to be considered when designing mitigation strategies.