Trend and climate signals in seasonal air concentration of organochlorine pesticides over the Great Lakes

Abstract

Following worldwide bans or restrictions, the atmospheric level of many organochlorine pesticides (OCPs) over the Great Lakes exhibited a decreasing trend since the 1980s in various environmental compartments. Atmospheric conditions also influence variation and trend of OCPs. In the present study a nonparametric Mann‐Kendall test with an additional process to remove the effect of temporal (serial) correlation was used to detect the temporal trend of OCPs in the atmosphere over the Great Lakes region and to examine the statistical significance of the trends. Using extended time series of measured air concentrations over the Great Lakes region from the Integrated Atmospheric Deposition Network, this study also revisits relationships between seasonal mean air concentration of OCPs and major climate variabilities in the Northern Hemisphere. To effectively extract climate signals from the temporal trend of air concentrations, we detrended air concentrations through removing their linear trend, which is driven largely by their respective half‐lives in the atmosphere. The interannual variations of the extended time series show a good association with interannual climate variability, notably, the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) and the El Niño–Southern Oscillation. This study demonstrates that the stronger climate signals can be extracted from the detrended time series of air concentrations of some legacy OCPs. The detrended concentration time series also help to interpret, in addition to the connection with interannual variation of the NAO, the links between atmospheric concentrations of OCPs and decadal or interdecadal climate change.