Tropospheric ozone (O₃) affects Earth’s climate and human health. Volatile organic compounds (VOCs), major contributors to O₃ formation, are of particular interest. Generally, the measured concentrations of VOCs (M-VOCs) and O₃ show nonlinear or even opposite time serial-trend. We attributed the phenomenon to survivor bias: lack of insight of the photochemically consumed VOCs (C-VOCs) which emitted from sources to ambient and devote to forming O₃, while excessive concern on the measured VOCs (M-VOCs) at observation site. Both observational and model results provide evidence that C-VOCs are the key to O₃ formation. We proposed an improved model to quantify the source contributions of C-VOCs (biogenic emissions, gasoline evaporation, industry, etc.) and their impacts on the formation of O₃, successfully avoiding the misidentification of dominant VOCs sources originated from the survivor bias in observational data. The survivor bias found in this study highlights that focusing of M-VOCs directly is insufficient and demonstrates the necessity of capture the sources of C-VOCs which contribute to O₃ formation.

对流层臭氧（O ₃）影响地球气候和人类健康。挥发性有机化合物 (VOC) 是 O ₃形成的主要贡献者，特别令人感兴趣。一般来说，VOCs（M-VOCs）和O ₃的实测浓度呈现非线性甚至相反的时间序列趋势。我们将此现象归因于幸存者偏差：对从源排放到环境并致力于形成O ₃的光化学消耗的VOCs (C-VOCs)缺乏洞察力，而过度关注观测现场测量的VOCs (M-VOCs)。观测和模型结果都证明 C-VOC 是 O _3的关键形成。我们提出了一个改进的模型来量化 C-VOCs 的来源贡献（生物排放、汽油蒸发、工业等）及其对 O ₃形成的影响，成功地避免了由于幸存者偏差导致的主要 VOCs 来源的错误识别。观测数据。本研究中发现的幸存者偏差强调了直接聚焦 M-VOC 是不够的，并证明了捕获有助于 O ₃形成的 C-VOC 来源的必要性。