COMPARISON OF SHORT-TERM AND LONG-TERM EXPERIMENTS DETERMINING THE VOLATILITY OF ATRAZINE FROM DIFFERENT SOIL SURFACES

The volatilization behaviour of surface applied ATRAZINE (2-chloro-4-ethylamino-6-isopropylamino-1,3,5-triazine) from two extremely different soils was determined directly by cold trapping of quantities of the airborne pesticide. Two-day experiments in the laboratory, as compared to minimum 15-day experiments in a climatized room, yielded shorter volatilization half-lives and volatilization rates, which are higher and strongly dependent on laboratory temperature variations. Climatized long-term experiments were mainly influenced by the soil moisture contents and yielded similar volatilization half-life values for the dry soils, showing a negative deviation for moist sand soil and a positive deviation for moist peat soil.