The hydroxyl radical (OH) is the most important oxidant on global and local scales in the troposphere. Urban OH controls the removal rate of primary pollutants and triggers the production of ozone. Interannual trends of OH in urban areas are not well documented or understood due to the short lifetime and high spatial heterogeneity of OH. We utilize machine learning with observational inputs emphasizing satellite remote sensing observations to predict surface OH in 49 North American cities from 2005 to 2014. We observe decadal changes in the summertime OH with wide variation among different cities. Compared to the summertime OH in 2005, 3 cities show an significant increase of OH whereas in 27 cities OH decreases in 2014. The year to year variation of OH is mapped to the decline of the NO₂ column. We conclude that these cities in this analysis are either in the NO_x limited regime or at the transition from a NO_x suppressed regime to a NO_x limited regime. The result emphasizes that controlling NO_x emissions will be most effective in regulating the ozone pollution over cities.

This dataset was produced by doi: 10.5281/zenodo.5296044

It contains machine learning inputs from both WRF-Chem and satellite observations.

The usage notes are described in README.docx file.