Quantifying impacts of crop residue burning in the North China Plain on summertime tropospheric ozone over East Asia

Crop residue burning has been proved to have negative impacts on regional atmospheric environment. In this study, an evidence-based statistical modeling framework was established to quantify potential impacts of crop residue burning in the North China Plain (NCP) on summertime tropospheric ozone increase over East Asia during 2004–2016. To assess the intensity of crop residue burning, fire occurrence counts derived from the MODerate-resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer onboard the Terra and Aqua satellites were used as a proxy. Additionally, another six factors were employed as potent explanatory variables. Maximum covariance analysis was first applied to decouple spatiotemporal interactions between tropospheric ozone and each explanatory variable. Based on the decoupled modes, multivariate linear regression (MLR) and artificial neural network (ANN) were used to establish statistical relationships between tropospheric ozone and contributing factors, respectively. The results indicate that the ANN-based modeling scheme enables to approximate the observed tropospheric ozone variations better than MLR. Further investigations reveal that the summertime crop residue burning in the NCP is the predominant factor contributing to the observed additive tropospheric ozone increases over East Asia, yielding extra 8% tropospheric ozone elevation on average in June. Moreover, UV radiation and wind also played critical roles in modulating the observed tropospheric ozone variations therein. In general, the critical role of crop residue burning over the NCP in modulating summertime tropospheric ozone increase over East Asia have been well demonstrated based on the proposed evidenced-based modeling framework.