Relationships between Atmospheric Transport Regimes and PCB Concentrations in the Air at Zeppelin, Spitsbergen

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Authors

UBL Sandy SCHERINGER Martin HUNGERBUHLER Konrad

Year of publication 2017
Type Article in Periodical
Magazine / Source ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
MU Faculty or unit

Faculty of Science

Citation
Web https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.7b02571
Doi http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/acs.est.7b02571
Keywords PERSISTENT ORGANIC POLLUTANTS; PARTICLE DISPERSION MODEL; POLYCHLORINATED-BIPHENYLS PCBS; HISTORICAL EMISSION INVENTORY; ARCTIC ATMOSPHERE; SOURCE REGIONS; PESTICIDES; CONGENERS; FLEXPART; TRACKING
Description Polychlorinated' biphenyls (PCBs) are persistent hazardous chemicals that are still detected in the atmosphere and other environmental media, although their production has been banned for several decades. At the long-term monitoring site, Zeppelin at Spitsbergen, different PCB congeners have been continuously measured for more than a decade. However, it is not clear what factors determine the seasonal and interannual variability of different (lighter versus heavier) PCB congeners. To investigate the influence of atmospheric transport patterns on PCB-28 and PCB-101 concentrations at Zeppelin, we applied the Lagrangian Particle Dispersion Model FLEXPART and calculated "footprints" that indicate the potential source regions of air arriving at Zeppelin. By means of a cluster analysis, we assigned groups of similar footprints to different transport regimes and analyzed the PCB concentrations according to the transport regimes. The concentrations of both PCB congeners are affected by the different transport regimes. For PCB-101, the origin of air masses from the European continent is primarily related to high concentrations; elevated PCB-101 concentrations in winter can be explained by the high frequency of this transport regime in winter, whereas PCB-101 concentrations are low when air is arriving from the oceans. For PCB-28, in contrast, concentrations are high during summer when air is mainly arriving from the oceans but low when air is arriving from the continents. The most likely explanation of this finding is that local emissions of PCB-28 mask the effect of long-range transport and determine the concentrations measured at Zeppelin.
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