Towards a better understanding of the lifecycle of pesticides in the atmosphere

Pesticides used to eliminate or control unwanted pests that can damage crops can be partitioned into the atmosphere, either in gas or particle, after their application in the field. The understanding of the biosphere-atmosphere exchange of pesticides becomes an essential parameter to consider, as this exchange can be an influence of a variety of atmospheric processes, which decides the fate of pesticides in the atmosphere, and there is an absence of data to quantify the processes. This research aims to determine eddy correlation fluxes of pesticides from the point of application to the regional scale by using a chemical ionization mass spectrometer (CIMS) in conjugation with a sonic anemometer (SA), to get the correlation between rapid changes in the concentration of the species of interest with the vertical wind velocity, which would be used to get the flux.