Development and Evaluation of Sampling and Analytical Techniques for Investigating Air-Water Exchange of Chemicals

Gas exchange across the air-water interface is one of the three major transport pathways for atmospheric inputs of organic pollutants in the Great Lakes. It is essential to advance our knowledge of the air-water exchange processes to improve our understanding of the environmental pathways and fate of a variety of persistent and toxic chemicals. Two complementary prototype devices were developed and tested for direct characterization of air-water exchange processes. One was a sparger device which was used to determine the (truly) dissolved concentration of a given chemical in water, and hence its potential for diffusive transfer at the air-water interface. The other was a flux chamber with which the chemical mass transfer rate from the water surface to the atmosphere (or vice versa) was determined. Ambient air and air from the sparger and flux chamber were collected/concentrated on multi-bed adsorbent tubes, followed by thermal desorption GC-MS analysis. Collected water samples were filtered and then concentrated on adsorbent tubes which were subject to similar thermal desorption GC-MS analytical procedures. The combination of these techniques provides a useful means for the estimation of the mass transfer rates of chemicals across the air-water interface.