Simulating nonequilibrium transport of atrazine through saturated soil

Atrazine, an herbicide widely used for selective control of grassy weeds in the fields where maize is grown, is a potential ground water contaminant in China and, consequently, there is interest in predicting its mobility in agricultural soils. In this study, we determined the nonequilibrium transport characteristics of atrazine in Shahe soil (Beijing sandy loam) using the advection-dispersion equation, and using a sensitivity analysis, we evaluated the contribution of the uncertainty in a given input parameter to the overall uncertainty in model results. The asymmetrical shape and tailing of the atrazine breakthrough curve (BTC) showed that atrazine was subject to nonequilibrium transport. The observed atrazine BTC was best fitted by the chemical nonequilibrium model with a nonlinear least-squares optimization approach. Results from the sensitivity analysis indicated that the retardation factor was the most sensitive parameter. Considering the reliability of the estimated parameters, the best fit to the atrazine BTC was obtained by fixing the retardation factor based on the linear distribution coefficient, and by calculating the dispersion coefficient from the bromide BTC and the average pore water velocity from the measured data; nonequilibrium parameters were the only unknown parameters that were optimized. Model verification procedures were based on best-fit parameters optimized from one soil column experiment and applied to simulate the transport of atrazine in the duplicate experiment. The results showed there was good agreement between measured and simulated concentrations for atrazine leaching in the soil column.