Ground-level ozone is a major pollutant throughout the world that causes many of the human health problems associated with air pollution. This project seeks to discover the impact of climate change on ground-level ozone in six cities in the Western United States. This was done by determining how ... Show moreGround-level ozone is a major pollutant throughout the world that causes many of the human health problems associated with air pollution. This project seeks to discover the impact of climate change on ground-level ozone in six cities in the Western United States. This was done by determining how many days per summer have ozone levels above the EPA standard (75 ppb) in the present climate and then estimating changes if the projected temperature values were to rise two or four degrees Fahrenheit. Models expect these temperature increases to occur near 2030 and 2050, respectively. The more stringent Canadian standard (65 ppb) was also used because studies show that ozone levels lower than the EPA standard are still detrimental to human health. The results showed an overall trend of increasing summer days with above-standard ozone: on average, the number of days above the American standard increased by 2.3 by 2030 and 5.0 by 2050 in these six cities. Average increases of 3.0 days by 2030 and 6.0 by 2050 were predicted using the Canadian standard. Significantly more days were expected to exceed the Canadian standard than the American standard. This study shows that all of the studied cities have summertime ozone levels that pose risk to human health and suggests that these problems will increase in the future with rising temperatures. This manuscript was prepared as part of the pre-college internship program, which was run by NCAR/RAL and Spark during the summer, 2012. Show less
