Event Details

DSI Wednesday Lunchtime Talks - 23rd June at 12.30 Lily Gouldsbrough from LEC will talks on Air Quality Extremes

Title : Is ozone a pollutant of concern for the UK? An extreme value analysis of UK ground-level ozone

Ground-level ozone episodes refer to sudden increases in concentrations of ozone. Such episodes adversely affect human health, plant ecosystems and can even damage building surfaces. Warm summer temperatures provide ideal conditions for such episodes to occur. With the possibility of heatwaves becoming more common due to global warming, understanding the effect of temperature on the magnitude and frequency of ozone episodes is particularly important.

Quantifying the risk of ozone episodes using historical observations can be tricky as they do not happen very often. This is where extreme value analysis is a particularly useful tool. I will introduce what extreme value analysis is and how we use it to quantify the risk of extreme levels of ozone across the UK, using data from the Automatic Urban and Rural Network. The resulting extreme value model provides a probabilistic assessment of the temperature-dependent likelihood of exceeding the UK public health ozone thresholds.

Join this talk via Teams link