Air Quality; Air Pollution Meteorology; Ozone; Particulate Matter; Mercury

Daniel J. Jacob, Darrell A. Winner,

Effect of climate change on air quality,

Atmospheric Environment,

Volume 43, Issue 1,

2009,

Pages 51-63,

ISSN 1352-2310,

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.atmosenv.2008.09.051.

(http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1352231008008571)

Abstract: Air quality is strongly dependent on weather and is therefore sensitive to climate change. Recent studies have provided estimates of this climate effect through correlations of air quality with meteorological variables, perturbation analyses in chemical transport models (CTMs), and CTM simulations driven by general circulation model (GCM) simulations of 21st-century climate change. We review these different approaches and their results. The future climate is expected to be more stagnant, due to a weaker global circulation and a decreasing frequency of mid-latitude cyclones. The observed correlation between surface ozone and temperature in polluted regions points to a detrimental effect of warming. Coupled GCM–CTM studies find that climate change alone will increase summertime surface ozone in polluted regions by 1–10ppb over the coming decades, with the largest effects in urban areas and during pollution episodes. This climate penalty means that stronger emission controls will be needed to meet a given air quality standard. Higher water vapor in the future climate is expected to decrease the ozone background, so that pollution