Asian Ozone May Be Traveling to Western U.S.

While ground-level ozone in cities in the Western U.S. has dropped due to pollution-control measures, scientists recently concluded that a rise in the gas in the region’s rural areas is likely due to winds carrying ozone from sources across the Pacific.

Led by the University of Colorado’s Owen Cooper, the Nature-published study analyzed thousands of samples collected at various elevations in the atmosphere and found that the level of ozone present in the spring has increased by 29 percent since 1984.

The study represents an early effort to understand cross-border pollution. While it is impossible to know how much of the ozone increase is from Asia, scientists did observe that the increase nearly doubled when winds came from South and East Asia.

Ground-level ozone has been linked to a host of respiratory problems, and the EPA recently announced it may opt to tighten rules concerning the gas.

In Nature’s commentary on the paper, atmospheric chemist Kathy Law wrote that the increases in ozone “have implications for climate change, causing warming either at the mid-latitudes where ozone forms, or in sensitive regions such as the Arctic to which ozone might be transported.”

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