Convective venting and surface ozone in Houston during TexAQS 2006

Abstract

The influence of convective mixing on surface ozone in Houston during TexAQS 2006 is examined. We use airborne lidar measurements of ozone and ship-based Doppler lidar measurements of winds, together with ship-and ground-based measurements of surface ozone to characterize horizontal and vertical mixing of ozone plumes from the Houston Ship Channel on two high-ozone days. We show that a stable capping layer trapped the plume in the boundary layer on 31 August, while shallow convection associated with active fair weather cumulus clouds mixed the plume with free tropospheric air on 17 August. Deep convection associated with an isolated air mass thunderstorm further decreased surface ozone near Galveston Bay in the late afternoon. High ozone thus affected a smaller area for a shorter period on 17 August, despite similar background concentrations and local production. We generalize these findings by comparing Houston ozone concentrations to National Weather Service (Lake Charles, LA) radiosondes. We show that for 1 June to 15 September 2006, stable conditions with high background ozone occurred 18% of the days leading to mean daily 8 h concentrations of 73 11 ppbv. Shallow and deep convection associated with moderate to strongly unstable conditions lowered the mean ozone to 50 11 ppbv (∼29% of days), while weaker convection associated with marginally unstable conditions reduced the mean concentrations to 63 13 ppbv (∼11%). We use these observations to derive simple relationships between surface ozone and convective indicators that may prove useful for parameterization of convective venting in air quality models. Copyright 2010 by the American Geophysical Union.