Analysis of Characteristics of Satellite-derived Air Pollutant over Southeast Asia and Evaluation of Tropospheric Ozone using Statistical Methods

Abstract

The statistical tools such as empirical orthogonal function (EOF), and singular value decomposition (SVD) have been applied to analyze the characteristic of air pollutant over southeast Asia as well as to evaluate Zimeke’s tropospheric column ozone (ZTO) determined by tropospheric residual method. In this study, we found that the EOF and SVD analyses are useful methods to extract the most significant temporal and spatial pattern from enormous amounts of satellite data. The EOF analyses with OMI NO₂ and OMI HCHO over southeast Asia revealed that the spatial pattern showed high correlation with fire count (r=0.8) and the EOF analysis of CO (r=0.7). This suggests that biomass burning influences a major seasonal variability on NO₂ and HCHO over this region. The EOF analysis of ZTO has indicated that the location of maximum ZTO was considerably shifted westward from the location of maximum of fire count and maximum month of ZTO occurred a month later than maximum month (March) of NO₂, HCHO and CO. For further analyses, we have performed the SVD analyses between ZTO and ozone precursor to examine their correlation and to check temporal and spatial consistency between two variables. The spatial pattern of ZTO showed latitudinal gradient that could result from latitudinal gradient of stratospheric ozone and temporal maximum of ZTO in March appears to be associated with stratospheric ozone variability that shows maximum in March. These results suggest that there are some sources of error in the tropospheric residual method associated with cloud height error, low efficiency of tropospheric ozone, and low accuracy in lower stratospheric ozone.