Data used in the analysis documented in "Revisiting Day-of-Week Ozone Patterns in an Era of Evolving U.S. Air Quality"

These files contain observed and CMAQ estimated gas species data and meteorological data that were used in the analysis documented in the manuscript "Revisiting Day-of-Week Ozone Patterns in an Era of Evolving U.S. Air Quality".  The files are packages as a set of .tar.gz files with a corresponding Data Dictionary that contains meta data for each data file. 

Abstract from the paper:

 Past work has shown that traffic patterns in the US and resulting NOX emissions vary by day of week, with NOX emissions typically higher on weekdays than weekends. This pattern of emissions leads to different levels of ozone on weekends versus weekdays and can be leveraged to understand how local ozone formation changes in response to NOX emissions perturbations in different urban areas. Specifically, areas with lower NOX but higher ozone on the weekends (the weekend effect) can be characterized as NOX -saturated and areas with both lower NOX and ozone on weekends (the weekday effect) can be characterized as NOX-limited. In this analysis we assess maximum daily 8-hr average (MDA8) ozone weekend-weekday differences across 51 US nonattainment areas using 18 years of observed and modeled data from 2002-2019 using two metrics: mean MDA8 ozone and percentage of days with MDA8 ozone > 70 ppb. In addition, we quantify the modeled and observed trends in these weekend-weekday differences across this period of substantial NOX emissions reductions in the US. The model assessment is carried out using EPA's Air QUAlity TimE Series Project (EQUATES) CMAQ dataset. We identify 3 types of MDA8 ozone trends occurring across the US: transitioning chemical regime, disappearing weekday effect, and no trend. The transitioning chemical regime trend occurs in a subset of large urban areas that were NOX -saturated (i.e., VOC-limited) at the beginning of the analysis period but transitioned to mixed chemical regimes or NOX-limited conditions by the end of the analysis period. Nine areas have strong transitioning chemical regime trends using both modeled and observed data and with both metrics indicating strong agreement that they are shifting to more NOX-limited conditions: Milwaukee, Houston, Phoenix, Denver, Northern Wasatch Front, Southern Wasatch Front, Las Vegas, Los Angeles – San Bernardino County, Los Angeles – South Coast, and San Diego. The disappearing weekday effect was identified for multiple rural and agricultural areas of California which were NOX -limited for the entire analysis period but appear to become less influenced by local day of week emission patterns in more recent years. Finally, we discuss a variety of reasons why there are no trends in certain areas including complex impacts of heterogeneous source mixes and stochastic impacts of meteorology. Overall, this assessment finds that the EQUATES modeling simulations indicate more NOX-saturated conditions than the observations but do a good job of capturing year-to-year changes in weekend-weekday MDA8 ozone patterns.