A low bias in carbon monoxide (CO) at northern latitudes is a common feature of chemistry climate models. We find that increasing Northern Hemisphere (NH) CO emissions or reducing NH OH concentrations improves the agreement with CO surface observations, but reducing NH OH leads to a better comparison with MOPITT. Removing model biases in ozone and water vapor increases the simulated methane lifetime, but it does not give the 20% reduction in NH OH suggested by our analysis of the CO bias.