The use of air quality forecasts to assess impacts of air pollution on crops: Methodology and case study

It has been reported that ambient ozone (O3), either alone or in concurrence with acid rain precursors, accounts for up to 90% of US crop losses resulting from exposure to all major air pollutants. Crop damage due to O3 exposure is of particular concern as ambient O3 concentrations remain high in many major food-producing regions. Assessing O3 damage to crops is challenging due to the difficulties in determining the reduction in crop yield that results from exposure to surface O3, for which monitors are limited and mostly deployed in non-rural areas. This work explores the potential benefits of using operational air quality forecast (AQF) data to estimate rural O3 exposure. Using the results from the first nationwide AQF as a case study, we demonstrate how the O3 data provided by AQF can be combined with concurrent crop information to assess O3 damages to soybeans in the United States. We estimate that exposure to ambient O3 reduces the US soybean production by 10% in 2005.