Can Column Formaldehyde Observations Inform Air Quality Monitoring Strategies for Ozone and Related Photochemical Oxidants?

Formaldehyde column density (ΩHCHO) showed a potentially useful correlation with surface ozone during the LISTOS campaign on Long Island Sound and the KORUS-AQ campaign in Seoul, South Korea. This builds on previous work that identified this relationship from in situ aircraft observations with similar findings for ground-based and airborne remote sensing of ΩHCHO. In the Long Island Sound region, ΩHCHO and surface ozone exhibited strong temporal ( = 0.66) and spatial ( = 0.73) correlation. The temporal variability in ΩHCHO (∼1 Dobson units [DU]) was larger than the range in the spatial average (∼0.1 DU). The spatial average is most useful for informing ozone monitoring strategies, demonstrating the challenge in using ΩHCHO satellite data sets for this purpose. In Seoul, high levels of NO resulted in O better correlating with ΩHCHO than surface ozone due to titration effects. The ΩHCHO-O relationship may therefore reflect the sum of surface ozone and related photochemical oxidants, relevant to air quality standards set to regulate this quantity such as the U.S. EPA National Ambient Air Quality Standard (NAAQS). The relationship of ΩHCHO to O shifted in Seoul during the campaign demonstrating the need to evaluate this relationship over longer time periods. With sufficient precision in future satellite retrievals, ΩHCHO observations could be useful for evaluating the adequacy of surface air quality monitoring strategies.