Evaluation of tropospheric ozone reanalyses with independent ozonesonde observations in East Asia

Abstract

The modern reanalysis datasets provide not only meteorological variables, but also atmospheric chemical compositions such as tropospheric ozone and aerosol concentration. However, the quality of chemical compositions has been rarely assessed especially over East Asia. To better understand the characteristics of reanalysis datasets on regional scale, the present study evaluates tropospheric ozone derived from seven reanalyses against five independent ozonesonde observations in East Asia. The reanalysis datasets are the ECMWF Reanalysis 5th (ERA5), Monitoring Atmospheric Composition and Climate reanalysis (MACCRA), Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service reanalysis (CAMSRA), as well as the NCEP Climate Forecast System Reanalysis (CFSR), NASA Modern-Era Retrospective analysis for Research and Applications version 2 (MERRA2), Japanese 55-year Reanalysis (JRA-55), and updated Tropospheric Chemistry Reanalysis (TCR-2). It turns out that MACCRA, CAMSRA, and TCR-2, which incorporate chemical transport model, depict most reasonable spatio-temporal variability of tropospheric ozone in East Asia. The MACC exhibits a better quality with relatively small mean biases of 6.4 +/- 1.3% in tropospheric column ozone than biases of 7.8 +/- 2.7% and 7.8 +/- 2.8% for CAMSRA and TCR-2. The CAMSRA further shows a significant monthly correlation with the observation of up to 0.7 at 850 hPa. Among the seven reanalyses, MACC, CAMSRA, and TCR-2 are suitable for local tropospheric ozone study on seasonal to inter-annual time scales. However, none of the seven reanalysis datasets reproduce the observed trend of tropospheric ozone. This result suggests that even the latest datasets are inadequate for the long-term ozone change study.