Assessment of meteorological and air quality drivers of elevated ambient ozone in Beijing via machine learning approach

Over the past few years, surface ozone (O₃) pollution has dominated China’s air pollution as particulate matter has decreased. In Beijing, the annual average concentrations of ground-level O₃ from 2015 to 2020 regularly increased from 57.32 to 62.72 μg/m³, showing a change of almost 9.4%, with a 1.6% per year increase. The meteorological factors are the primary influencer of elevated O₃ levels; however, their importance and heterogeneity of variables remain rarely understood. In this study, we used 13 meteorological factors and 6 air quality (AQ) parameters to estimate their influencing score using the random forest (RF) algorithm to explain and predict ambient O₃. Among the meteorological variables and overall, both land surface temperature and temperature at 2 m from the surface emerged as the most influential factors, while NO₂ stood out as the highest influencing factor from the AQ parameters. Indeed, it is crucial and imperative to reduce the temperature caused by climate change in order to effectively control ambient O₃ levels in Beijing. Overall, meteorological factors alone exhibited a higher coefficient of determination (R ²) value of 0.80, compared with AQ variables of 0.58, for the post-lockdown period. In addition, we calculated the number of days O₃ concentration levels exceeded the WHO standard and newly proposed peak-season maximum daily 8-h average (MDA8) O₃ guideline for Beijing. The exceedance number of days from the WHO standard of MDA8 ambient O₃ was observed to be the highest in June, and each studied year crossed peak season guidelines by almost 2 times margin. This study demonstrates the contributions of meteorological variables and AQ parameters in surging ambient O₃ and highlights the importance of future research toward devising an optimum strategy to combat growing O₃ pollution in urban areas. Graphical Abstract: [Figure not available: see fulltext.]