Pesticides are a unique class of chemical contaminants that humans deliberately introduce to the environment in large quantities. Once applied to crops, pesticides enter the atmosphere through spray drift, volatilization, and wind erosion of soil. Pesticides can then undergo atmospheric transport and return to Earth’s surface through precipitation. This work seeks to identify and quantify pesticides in rainwater and snowfall to explore spatial and temporal trends in their deposition fluxes. Precipitation samples were collected in northeast Ohio from 2018-2021 and analyzed by liquid chromatography quadrupole time-of-flight mass spectrometry (LC-QTOF-MS). Preliminary results from suspect screening show that herbicides such as atrazine are prevalent in the samples. Work is currently underway to confirm the identity of over 40 additional compounds through use of reference standards. Future work will apply air mass back trajectory analysis and statistical testing to assess whether local or regional sources dominate pesticide deposition fluxes in northeast Ohio.

Characterizing pesticides in precipitation samples using high-resolution mass spectrometry

ACS Spring 2022

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