THE RISE OF THE FINELY-ADVANCED TRANSBOUNDARY ENVIRONMENTAL MODEL (FATE): A STATE-OF-THE-ART MODEL PREDICTION OF THE GLOBAL SINK OF PERSISTENT ORGANIC POLLUTANTS

摘要

The Finely-Advanced Transboundary Environmental model (FATE) was developed to better understand and quantify the non-steady dynamics of Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs) in the global environment. FATE is a simulator that encodes POPs dynamics in the five environmental compartments (atmosphere, oceans, cryosphere, soil, and vegetation), such as atmospheric advection and diffusion processes, and bioconcentration processes in the vegetation and marine phytoplankton. We demonstrate the FATE-predictions of the polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) #28 and #153, for the period of 1931-2100. Our focus here is on the global sinks (degradations, and the removal to the deep oceans) of PCBs. The fractions of annual global sinks in the environmental compartments varied significantly with the chlorination level of the selected PCBs: The primary sinks in the past 80 years appeared to be degradations in the atmosphere and soil for PCB#28 (58%) and PCB#153 (47%), respectively. PCB#153 removal to the deep ocean was a secondary sink (21%), while this was not the case for PCB#28 (less than 1%).