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Latina Lista: News from the Latinx perspective > Columns & Features > BlogBeat > Why emissions near equator are extra dangerous

Why emissions near equator are extra dangerous

By Thania Benios




“Emissions are growing in places where there is a much greater effect on the formation of ozone,” says Jason West, who led the research at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with former graduate student and first author Yuqiang Zhang. “A ton of emissions in a region close to the equator, where there is a lot of sunlight and intense heat, produces more ozone than a ton of emissions in a region farther from it.”

The work, published online in Nature Geoscience, provides a much-needed path forward on where in the world to strategically reduce emissions of pollutants that form ozone, which when present in the lower atmosphere, or troposphere, is one of the primary causes of air pollution-related respiratory problems and heart disease. (In the upper atmosphere, or stratosphere, ozone helps protect against the sun’s ultraviolet rays.)


The reason is that ozone, a greenhouse gas and toxic air pollutant, is not emitted but forms when ultraviolet light hits nitrogen oxides (basically combustion exhaust from cars and other sources). When these pollutants interact with more intense sunlight and higher temperatures, the interplay speeds up the chemical reactions that form ozone. Higher temperatures near the equator also increase the vertical motion of air, transporting ozone-forming chemicals higher in the troposphere, where they can live longer and form more ozone.


Zhang, West, and colleagues, including Owen Cooper and Audrey Gaudel, from the University of Colorado Boulder and NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory, used a computer model to simulate the total amount of ozone in the troposphere, the part of the atmosphere where ozone is harmful to humans and agriculture, between 1980 and 2010.

Since emissions have shifted south during this period, they wanted to answer, what contributed more to the increased production of ozone worldwide: the changing magnitude of emissions or location? “Location, by far,” says West, an associate professor of environmental sciences in the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health.


“A more challenging scenario is that even if there is a net reduction in global emissions, ozone levels may not decrease if emissions continue to shift toward the equator,” says Cooper. “But continuing aircraft and satellite observations of ozone across the tropics can monitor the situation and model forecasts can guide decision making for controlling global ozone pollution.”

Source: UNC-Chapel Hill

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