Regional Attribution of Ozone Production and Associated Radiative Forcing: a Step to Crediting NOx Emission Reductions

The global distribution of tropospheric ozone (O3) depends on the location of emissions of its precursors in addition to chemical and dynamical factors. The global picture of O3 forcing is, therefore, a sum of regional forcings arising from emissions of precursors from different sources. The Kyoto Protocol does not include ozone as a greenhouse gas, and emission reductions of ozone precursors made under Kyoto or any similar agreement would presently receive no credit. In this study, we quantitatively estimate the contribution of emissions of nitrogen oxides (NOx), the primary limiting O3 precursor in the non-urban atmosphere, from specific countries and regions of the world to global O3 concentration distributions. We then estimate radiative forcing resulting from the regional perturbations of NOx emissions. This analysis is intended as an early step towards incorporating O3 into the Kyoto Protocol or any successor agreement. Under such a system countries could obtain credit for improvements in local air quality that result in reductions of O3 concentrations because of the associated reductions in radiative forcing. We use the global chemistry transport model, MOZART-2, to simulate the global O3 distribution for base year 1990 and perturbations to this distribution caused by a 10% percent reduction in the base emissions of NOx from the United States, Europe, East Asia, India, South America, and Africa. We calculate the radiative forcing for the simulated base and perturbed O3 distributions using the GFDL radiative transfer model. The difference between the radiative forcing from O3 for the base and perturbed distributions provides an estimate of the marginal radiative forcing from a region's emissions of NOx. We will present a quantitative analysis of the magnitude, spatial, and temporal distribution of radiative forcing resulting from marginal changes in the NOx emissions from each region.