The influence of vertical sorbed phase transport on the fate of organic chemicals in surface soils

Gaseous exchange between surface soil and the atmosphere is an important process in the environmental fate of many chemicals. It was hypothesized that this process is influenced by vertical transport of chemicals sorbed to soil particles. Vertical sorbed phase transport in surface soils occurs by many processes such as bioturbation, cryoturbation, and erosion into cracks formed by soil drying. The solution of the advection/ diffusion equation proposed by Jury et al. to describe organic chemical fate in a uniformly contaminated surface soil was modified to include vertical sorbed phase transport. This process was modeled using a sorbed phase diffusion coefficient, the value of which was derived from soil carbon mass balances in the literature. The effective diffusivity of the chemical in a typical soil was greater in the modified model than in the model without sorbed phase transport for compounds with log K-OW > 2 and log K-OA > 6. Within this chemical partitioning space, the rate of volatilization from the surface soil was larger in the modified model than in the original model by up to a factor of 65. The volatilization rate was insensitive to the value of the sorbed phase diffusion coefficient throughout much of this chemical partitioning space, indicating that the surface soil layer was essentially well-mixed and that the mass transfer coefficient was determined by diffusion through the atmospheric boundary layer only. When this process was included in a non-steady-state regional multimedia chemical fate model running with a generic emissions scenario to air, the predicted soil concentrations increased by upto a factor of 25,while the air concentrations decreased by as much as a factor of similar to3. Vertical sorbed phase transport in the soil thus has a major impact on predicted air and soil concentrations, the state of equilibrium, and the direction and magnitude of the chemical flux between air and soil. It is a key process influencing the environmental fate of persistent organic pollutants (POPs).