Abstract

The Global Monitoring Plan of the Minamata Convention on Mercury was established to generate long-term data necessary for evaluating the effectiveness of regulatory measures at a global scale. After 25 years monitoring (since 1995), Mace Head is one of the atmospheric monitoring stations with the longest mercury record, and has produced sufficient data for the analysis of temporal trends of Total Gaseous Mercury (TGM) in Europe and the Northern Atlantic. Using concentration-weighted trajectories for atmospheric mercury measured at Mace Head as well as other five locations in Europe, Amderma, Andøya, Villum, Waldhof and Zeppelin we identify the regional probabilistic source contribution factor and its changes for the period of 1996 to 2019. Temporal trends indicate that concentrations of mercury in the atmosphere in Europe and the Northern Atlantic have declined significantly over the past 25 years, at a non-monotonic rate averaging of 0.03 ng m-3 year-1. Concentrations of TGM at remote marine sites were shown to be affected by continental long-range transport, and evaluation of reanalysis back-trajectories display a significant decrease of TGM in continental air masses from Europe in the last two decades. In addition, using the relationship between mercury and other atmospheric trace gases that could serve as a source signature, we perform factorization regression analysis, based on positive rotatable factorization of non-singular matrix to solve probabilistic mass function. We reconstructed atmospheric mercury concentration and accessed the contribution of the major natural and anthropogenic sources. The positive matrix factorization (PMF) reveals that the downward trend is mainly associated with a factor with a high load of long-lived anthropogenic species.

Highlights

  • Mercury is a toxic pollutant of crucial concern to public health globally

  • Based on the total gaseous mercury (TGM) associated with each air mass trajectory, we investigated the impact of atmospheric circulation on continental Europe and Northern Atlantic Ocean and observe distinct concentration patterns for the ocean and continental regions

  • A conundrum in the observed negative trend in mercury in Europe and Northern Atlantic over the past two decades is explained in this study by a decrease in anthropogenic emissions

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Summary

Introduction

Mercury is a toxic pollutant of crucial concern to public health globally. Due to its neurotoxicity, bioaccumulation, and long-range atmospheric transport, mercury was added to the priority list of several international agreements and conventions dealing with environmental protection, including the MinamataConvention on Mercury (e.g. Driscoll et al, 2013). Following the entry-into-force of the Stockholm Convention (SC) in 2004 accompanied by the Minamata convention in 2013 to restrict releases of mercury and its compounds to the environment, a Global Monitoring Plan was devised to evaluate the effectiveness of regulatory measures at regional and global scales. At this time, regions such as Western Europe and North. This downward trend has been attributed to decreasing emissions from the North Atlantic Ocean due to decreasing mercury concentrations in subsurface water (Soerensen et al, 2012) and more recently to decreasing global anthropogenic emissions mainly due to the decline of mercury release from commercial products (Horowitz et al, 2014) and the changes of

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