Narrator: This is Science Today. Limiting ozone concentrations is an important goal because ozone is a highly reactive, toxic gas that damages our lungs, materials and crops. Scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s Atmospheric Science Division have created a computer model to better understand the sources of ozone. Physicist Cyndi Atherton says this is important to know because how we regulate and control emissions will depend on that.

Atherton: So what we’re trying to do is look realistically at how much ozone are we forming from hydrocarbons and nitrogen oxides reacting. How much of that can we control versus how much of that is coming from high above?

Narrator: Atherton makes sure the emissions that are entered into the computer model are realistic and accurate.

Atherton: I do a lot of looking at our results and understanding how those compare to actual observations and if they do compare well, why and if they don’t, what are we missing, either physically or chemically? So that we think that we have a robust model that you can believe if we were in situations other than those we can extrapolate.

Narrator: For Science Today, I’m Larissa Branin.