ACP Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics ACP 1680-7324 Copernicus GmbH Göttingen, Germany 10.5194/acp-12-11485-2012 Long-term changes in lower tropospheric baseline ozone concentrations at northern mid-latitudes Parrish D. D. 1 Law K. S. 2 Staehelin J. 3 Derwent R. 4 Cooper O. R. 1 5 Tanimoto H. 6 Volz-Thomas A. 7 Gilge S. 8 Scheel H.-E. 9 Steinbacher M. 10 Chan E. 11 NOAA ESRL Chemical Sciences Division, 325 Broadway, Boulder, CO, USA UPMC Univ. Paris 06, Univ. Versailles Saint-Quentin, CNRS/INSU, UMR8190, LATMOS/IPSL, Paris, France Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science, ETHZ, Universitätstrasse 16, 8092 Zürich, Switzerland rdscientific, Newbury, Berkshire RG14 6LH, UK CIRES, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, USA National Institute for Environmental Studies, 16-2 Onogawa, Tsukuba, Ibaraki 305-8506, Japan IEK-8, Forschungszentrum Juelich, 52425 Juelich, Germany Hohenpeissenberg Meteorological Observatory, German Meteorological Service (DWD), Hohenpeissenberg, Germany Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, IMK-IFU, 82467 Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology (EMPA), Duebendorf, Switzerland Science and Technology Branch, Environment Canada, 4905 Dufferin Street, Toronto, Ontario, Canada 04 12 2012 12 23 11485 11504 This is an open-access article ditributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. This article is available from http://www.atmos-chem-phys.net/12/11485/2012/acp-12-11485-2012.html The full text article is available as a PDF file from http://www.atmos-chem-phys.net/12/11485/2012/acp-12-11485-2012.pdf

Changes in baseline (here understood as representative of continental to hemispheric scales) tropospheric O<sub>3</sub> concentrations that have occurred at northern mid-latitudes over the past six decades are quantified from available measurement records with the goal of providing benchmarks to which retrospective model calculations of the global O<sub>3</sub> distribution can be compared. Eleven data sets (ten ground-based and one airborne) including six European (beginning in the 1950's and before), three North American (beginning in 1984) and two Asian (beginning in 1991) are analyzed. When the full time periods of the data records are considered a consistent picture emerges; O<sub>3</sub> has increased at all sites in all seasons at approximately 1% yr<sup>&minus;1</sup> relative to the site's 2000 yr mixing ratio in each season. For perspective, this rate of increase sustained from 1950 to 2000 corresponds to an approximate doubling. There is little if any evidence for statistically significant differences in average rates of increase among the sites, regardless of varying length of data records. At most sites (most definitively at the European sites) the rate of increase has slowed over the last decade (possibly longer), to the extent that at present O<sub>3</sub> is decreasing at some sites in some seasons, particularly in summer. The average rate of increase before 2000 shows significant seasonal differences (1.08 ± 0.09, 0.89 ± 0.10, 0.85 ± 0.11 and 1.21 ± 0.12% yr<sup>&minus;1</sup> in spring, summer, autumn and winter, respectively, over North America and Europe).

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