Breathe easy: Concentrations of ozone in the air have decreased over large parts of the country in the past several decades. But not too easy.
Policies and new technologies have reduced emissions of precursor gases that lead to ozone air pollution, but despite those improvements, the amount of ozone that plants are taking in has not followed the same trend, according to Florida State University researchers. Their findings are published in the journal Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene .
“Past studies of plant damage from ozone have been overly optimistic about what the improving ozone air quality means for vegetation health,” said Christopher Holmes, the Werner A. and Shirley B. Baum assistant professor of meteorology in the Department of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Science.
Ozone is a gas made of three oxygen molecules. In the upper levels of the atmosphere, it is helpful for life on Earth because it keeps too much ultraviolet radiation from reaching the planet’s surface. But when it’s found at ground level, ozone is a pollutant that can damage the lungs. It’s also toxic for plants, and present-day levels of the pollutant have cut global grain yields by up to 15 percent, resulting in global losses of soybean, wheat, rice and maize valued at $10 billion to $25 billion annually.
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