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A better understanding of background tropospheric ozone delivers multiple benefits. Robust estimates of regional background ozone are required to understand the limits of anthropogenic emissions controlling ozone reduction. Long-term estimates of background ozone assist in characterising changes in atmospheric composition and can help quantify the influence of human activity on the atmosphere. Background tropospheric ozone measurements representative of continental air masses are scarce in Australia. Here, we use k-means clustering to identify a cluster of measurements from the long-term air quality monitoring station at Oakdale, NSW, which are likely to be representative of background air. The cluster is associated with NOx-limited air masses of continental origin. From this analysis, we estimate background ozone representative of Eastern Australia. We find recent (2017–2022) mean ozone mixing ratios of 28.5 ppb and identify a statistically significant (α = 0.05) trend in the mean of +1.8 (1.0–2.8) ppb/decade. Our methods demonstrate that some long-term monitoring stations within or near urban areas can provide suitable conditions and datasets for regional Global Atmosphere Watch monitoring. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dust storms originating from Central Australia and western New South Wales frequently cause high particle concentrations at many sites across New South Wales, both inland and along the coast. This study focussed on a dust storm event in February 2019 which affected air quality across the state as detected at many ambient monitoring stations in the Department of Planning, Industry and Environment (DPIE) air quality monitoring network. The WRF-Chem (Weather Research and Forecast Model—Chemistry) model is used to study the formation, dispersion and transport of dust across the state of New South Wales (NSW, Australia). Wildfires also happened in northern NSW at the same time of the dust storm in February 2019, and their emissions are taken into account in the WRF-Chem model by using Fire Inventory from NCAR (FINN) as emission input. The model performance is evaluated and is shown to predict fairly accurate the PM2.5 and PM10 concentration as compared to observation. The predicted PM2.5 concentration over New South Wales during 5 days from 11 to 15 February 2019 is then used to estimate the impact of the February 2019 dust storm event on three health endpoints, namely mortality, respiratory and cardiac disease hospitalisation rates. The results show that even though as the daily average of PM2.5 over some parts of the state, especially in western and north western NSW near the centre of the dust storm and wild fires, are very high (over 900 µg/m3), the population exposure is low due to the sparse population. Generally, the health impact is similar in order of magnitude to that caused by biomass burning events from wildfires or from hazardous reduction burnings (HRBs) near populous centres such as in Sydney in May 2016. One notable difference is the higher respiratory disease hospitalisation for this dust event (161) compared to the fire event (24). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]