The present study attempts to provide in insight into the chaotic nature of air pollutants by applying the recent developments in [lie field of nonlinear dynamics. The Volterra-Wiener-Korenberg (VWK) series approach by Barahona and Poon [1996. Detection of nonlinear dynamics in short, noisy time series. Nature 381, 215-217] has been used to investigate the nonlinearity of O-3, NO, NO2 and CO time series at two urban stations, namely-Hohenpeissenberg and Jungfraujoch. Nonlinearity has been detected in NO2, and CO time series at both the stations. The numerical titration technique [Poon, C., Barahona, M., 2001. Titration of chaos with added noise. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 98, 7107-7112] reveals that the dynamics of NO, and CO are indeed governed by deterministic chaos. Cao's method [Cao, L., 1997. Practical method for determining the minimum embedding dimension of I scalar time series. Physica D 110, 43-50] to determine the minimum embedding dimension further reveals that probably the dynamics of both NO, and CO time series are manifestations of high-dimensional chaos. It is interesting to note that similar chaotic characteristic of NO, and CO time series have been observed at both the sites indicating a possible universality in their chaotic nature in the ambient urban environment. (C) 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.