Co-occurrence of extremes in surface ozone, particulate matter, and temperature over eastern North America.

ABSTRACT: Heat waves and air pollution episodes pose a serious threat to human health and may worsen under future climate change. In this paper, we use 15 years (1999-2013) of commensurately gridded (1° x 1°) surface observations of extended summer (April-September) surface ozone (O₃), fine particulate matter (PM_2.5), and maximum temperature (TX) over the eastern United States and Canada to construct a climatology of the coincidence, overlap, and lag in space and time of their extremes. Extremes of each quantity are defined climatologically at each grid cell as the 50 d with the highest values in three 5-y windows (∼95th percentile). Any two extremes occur on the same day in the same grid cell more than 50% of the time in the northeastern United States, but on a domain average,

SUBMITTER: Schnell JL 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5358352 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature