Priority and emerging pollutants in the Moscow rain

Air quality is a worldwide problem. Nowadays, thousands of chemicals may be found in the atmosphere from biogenic and anthropogenic sources due to numerous atmospheric reactions. Unfortunately, throughout the world only a small group of organic compounds is monitored on a regular basis. Therefore, an important environmental task involves discovering the most important pollutants for particular cities and regions for regular monitoring in the future. Direct measurements of contaminants in the atmosphere are not always efficient as air represents an extremely dynamic medium. Thus indirect analysis by using precipitations becomes a more popular method of environmental analysis. Over 700 organic compounds belonging to the various classes of chemicals were identified in the Moscow rainwater samples collected in the spring of 2017 using GC/MS instruments including the most analytically powerful modern technique - GC x GC-HRMS. Here we report the nature and levels of 160 priority pollutants and emerging contaminants belonging to the most relevant classes from the environmental point of view: polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, polychlorinated biphenyls, organophosphates, dialkylphthalates, phenols, and alkylpyridines. This is the first work dealing with GC-MS analysis of the rainwater in Moscow (Russia). (C) 2018 Published by Elsevier B.V.