Long term change in relative contribution of various source regions on the surface ozone over Japan

Although the concentrations of O3 precursors over Japan have been decreasing in recent decades, long-term monitoring data shows that the surface concentration of O3 in Japan has increased since the mid-1980s until the present time. As the cause of this recent increase in surface O3 over Japan, the trans-boundary transport of O3 from the outside of Japan have been pointed out and discussed. In particular, transport from East Asian countries whose emissions of the O3 precursors have been greatly increasing recently due to their economic growth is likely a major cause of the observed increase in O3 over Japan. However, the long-term change in other factors that also have an influence on the O3 in Japan, such as the domestic emissions or the background O3, should also be evaluated. Here, we performed a long-term (1980-2005) simulation of the Source-Receptor (S-R) relationship for surface O3 in East Asia by utilizing the tagged tracer method with a global chemical transport model. During this period, emissions of O3 precursors in the model from East Asia, especially from China, have increased more than double, while those from North America have not change so much and those from Europe have decreased. The model simulated the long-term increasing trend in the surface O3 over Japan similar to the observation. The long-term changes of contributions from each source region of O3 showed that the largest contributor to the increasing trend of surface O3 in Japan is the increase of O3 created in planetary boundary layer (PBL) of China which accounts for 35% of the trend, and those of O3 created in PBL of Korean Peninsular and Japan account for 13% and 12%, respectively. The O3 created in free troposphere of China also increased, which account for 4% of the trend. Therefore, almost 40% of recent O3 increase in Japan can be attributed to the increase in the O3 created over China.