Ozone and related trace gases (CO, NOx, VOCs, etc.) play essential roles in determining air quality, oxidizing capacity of the atmosphere, budgets of various other trace gases and also climate
change. The emissions of these gases are increasing over Indian subcontinent owing to rapid growth in economy and higher energy needs. Further, satellite retrievals also indicate high levels of pollution
across Indo-Gangetic plain and this pollution under favorable meteorological conditions can be transported to other regions as well, including the pristine Himalayas. In light of above facts, an extensive study performed during a PhD thesis was aimed to understand
some of the underlying processes and to fill the gaps through surface based observations of ozone and related trace gases over the Himalayan region during SusKat field campaign and balloon borne observations of
ozone and met parameters over Manora Peak, Nainital.
During the SusKat observations, it was realized that the discrepancies between
the model and observation results could be mainly due coarse resolution of input emission inventories. Additionally, further tuning in the model
setup, including testing of various land surface models etc are needed. The use of a chemical box model
could also provide in-depth information on the underlying atmospheric chemistry of the region. Here, I
propose to setup and use the box-models, improvement in
WRF-Chem setup over the Himalayan region, improvement in emission inventories. Some campaign based specific vertical measurements of ozone and meteorological parameters could be carried-out during my PDF tenure at ARIES to investigate above mentioned objectives.