DYNAMIC PARTITIONING OF ORGANIC-CHEMICALS IN REGIONAL ENVIRONMENTS - A MULTIMEDIA SCREENING-LEVEL MODELING APPROACH

A screening-level spatial-multimedia-compartmental (SMCM) approach to modeling the fate and transport of volatile organic pollutants in regional environments is presented. The SMCM approach, which makes use of both uniform (i.e., well-mixed) and nonuniform (one-dimensional) compartments, incorporates a variety of transport phenomena associated with pollutant transport such as dry deposition, rain scavenging, runoff, infiltration, soil drying, and pollutant diffusion and convection in the vadose zone. The multimedia distributions of trichloroethylene, tetrachloroethylene, and 1, 1, 1-trichloroethane in the Los Angeles area, and tetrachloroethylene in the San Diego area, were explored by using the SMCM model. The predicted concentrations were found to be in reasonable agreement with the available field data. The study suggests that the SMCM approach is useful and efficient for rapid screening-level analysis of the steady-state or dynamic multimedia distribution of chemical pollutants. © 1990, American Chemical Society. All rights reserved.