One

of the main secondary pollutants formed in Los

Angeles smog is ozone. While it is the same molecule
one should not confuse ozone at the surface with
ozone in the stratosphere, which protects us from the
suns UV radia?on. There is much more ozone in the
stratosphere and the ozone at the surface cannot take
over this role. On the other, hand ozone at the surface
is a concern as this is where humans live. High levels of
ozone can cause eyes to tear and can make it dicult
to breath.

To have an idea how bad ozone levels in Los Angeles
were and s?ll are we need to look at what we believe
the natural concentra?ons of ozone are. We know very
liFle about ozone in the distant past, but we have one
piece of informa?on from Paris around the year 1900.
At Montsouris a group of scien?st made accurate
measurements of ozone which researchers today were
able to reanalyze to determine the ozone mixing ra?os.
120 years ago there were around 5 15 ppb of ozone
in Paris. Since this was before the widespread use of
the combus?on engine we believe that these were the
pre-industrial levels of ozone. If one looks in remote
areas today the background levels of ozone are more in
the range of 30-40ppb. The global surface ozone levels
have thus more than doubled in the past 120 years. We
can now compare this value with those measurement
in Los Angeles in the 1970s which reached up to
600ppb, 20 ?mes higher than the natural levels. Even
today we can, on occasion, reach mixing ra?os of up to
150ppb. It is not uncommon to nd such high mixing
ra?os in other urban areas around the world.

Here is a model calcula?on on the Average July

aZernoon ozone levels around the world. We again can
see the high ozone mixing ra?os coincide with the most
heavily populated areas in the work, such as the US,
Europe, and southeast Asia. We can also see that the
biomass burning area in southern Africa has some high
ozone.

The ozone life?me in the troposphere is around 1
month. Ozone can thus be transported quite eec?vely
between con?nents. For example one can see the
ou^low from Asia into the Pacic as well as the
inuence of North America on the Atlan?c.

This gure shows the spa?al distribu?on of ozone in

the LA Basin in 1988. In contrast to the primary
pollutants the highest ozone levels can be found on the
east side of Los Angeles and in the surrounding
mountains. The West-side of Los Angeles has some of
the lowest ozone levels. Later we will discuss this
behavior in more detail, but for now we can summarize
it as the interplay of the slow inland transport of Los
Angeles pollu?on and the chemical forma?on of ozone
along the way.

Ozone mixing ra?os have steadily decrease in Los
Angeles, as shown here in this gure from the
California Air Resources Board. The black line shows the
maximum one hour ozone value in a year, whicle the
gray curve shows the 4th highest 8-hour average ozone
mixing ra?o, a common measure to track the longterm
trend of ozone in a city. Both measures have decreased
since 1992. The decrease in ozone has slowed down
since the year 2000 and the improvements are now
quite slow. Nevertheless, we now rarely see ozone
above 150ppb in Los Angeles, and averaged over an 8
hour period the highest values are more in the 100pb
range.

Another way of looking at this improvement is to

compare the number of days various areas in LA
exceeded the na?onal air quality standard in a year,
here shown as a 3 year average.

While all areas in the LA basin encountered some days
above the na?onal air quality standard and the en?re
east side of the basin had more than 100 days above
the standard. In 2011 much of LA had 0 5 days above
the air quality standard and only the most eastern part
of the basin s?ll had more than 100 days of
exceedances.