Water Pollution Simulation and Health Risk Assessm

Authors: Bing Chen

Publish Date: 2008/11/19

Volume: 200, Issue: 1-4, Pages: 323-339

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Abstract

To address the growing concerns on water pollution caused by pesticide losses this study aimed at refining a contaminant transport model and applying it to health risk assessment for pesticidecontaminated water It was an advance of the previous modeling works by integrating a dynamic twobigleaf multilayer pesticide emission module with the existing pesticide runoff loss simulation model PeLM A risk assessment approach was further employed to evaluate the health effects based on the simulation of pesticide pollution by the refined model The modeling performance and feasibility were examined through a case study conducted in the AuglaizeBlanchard Watershed OH USA A widely used herbicide atrazine was targeted Both the original and refined PeLM were tested and compared The results indicated that the refined model had advantages in accounting for more pesticide transport processes and improving the simulation accuracy The risk assessment results disclosed that atrazine concentrations in the river were usually lower than the American standards To further explore the potential pesticide pollution problems and the associated health risks a more stringent standard ie Canadian guideline was also employed The results indicated that the daily average concentrations of the pesticide sometimes markedly surpassed the guideline particularly during the wet season May to August Correspondingly the maximum values of the chronic and acute hazard indices could exceed over 13 times of the recommended thresholds The developed methodologies and findings would help raise concerns on pesticide pollution and provide support for decision making related to water pollution mitigation and quality managementmatrix Q = left P + SM I right2 mathordleft/ vphantom left P + SM I right2 left P + SM I + S right right kernnulldelimiterspace left P + SM I + S right I = 02S S = 1000 mathordleft/ vphantom 1000 CN 10 right kernnulldelimiterspace CN 10

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