This study identifies the relationship between summertime ozone air quality in the eastern United States and large-scale meteorological patterns, including sea surface temperature (SST) patterns and teleconnections, evolving over the preceding months. We show that this relationship can be used in spring to predict ozone for the following summer. Our work implies that large-scale phenomena such as the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation may drive multidecadal variability in US ozone air quality. We find in particular that springtime tropical Atlantic SSTs have a significant influence on summertime meteorology and ozone air quality in the eastern United States, but the free-running, atmosphere-only climate models with prescribed SSTs fail to capture these seasonally evolving teleconnections.
We develop a statistical model to predict June–July–August (JJA) daily maximum 8-h average (MDA8) ozone concentrations in the eastern United States based on large-scale climate patterns during the previous spring. We find that anomalously high JJA ozone in the East is correlated with these springtime patterns: warm tropical Atlantic and cold northeast Pacific sea surface temperatures (SSTs), as well as positive sea level pressure (SLP) anomalies over Hawaii and negative SLP anomalies over the Atlantic and North America. We then develop a linear regression model to predict JJA MDA8 ozone from 1980 to 2013, using the identified SST and SLP patterns from the previous spring. The model explains ∼45% of the variability in JJA MDA8 ozone concentrations and ∼30% variability in the number of JJA ozone episodes (>70 ppbv) when averaged over the eastern United States. This seasonal predictability results from large-scale ocean–atmosphere interactions. Warm tropical Atlantic SSTs can trigger diabatic heating in the atmosphere and influence the extratropical climate through stationary wave propagation, leading to greater subsidence, less precipitation, and higher temperatures in the East, which increases surface ozone concentrations there. Cooler SSTs in the northeast Pacific are also associated with more summertime heatwaves and high ozone in the East. On average, models participating in the Atmospheric Model Intercomparison Project fail to capture the influence of this ocean–atmosphere interaction on temperatures in the eastern United States, implying that such models would have difficulty simulating the interannual variability of surface ozone in this region.