The Measures of Ozone Pollution: An Analysis of Ozone Concentration Data in USA

In this study, we analyzed how ozone pollution could be differently measured and how these different measures varied year to year and across the ten most populated cities in the United States, from 1980 to 2000. Although peak values of ozone concentration have been significantly reduced in most polluted U.S. cities for the last 20 years, the annual average values of ozone concentration have not been lowered as much as peak values. Ozone concentration data for each city shows a unique pattern of distribution, central tendency, and also there is a wide variation among different ozone measures. Two different cities with the same annual mean concentration of ozone can experience very different distributions of ozone concentration within a year. Ozone measures also show a wide margin of variability as they are estimated from different ozone monitoring sites within each city. Ozone pollution statistics can be largely varied depending on the choice of measures, monitoring sites, and averaging time period. EPA’s new ozone standard of 0.08 ppm averaged over an eight-hour appears to be more stringent than the current maximum ozone standard of 0.12 ppm averaged over one hour.