Exploratory Investigation of Concentrations of Total Gaseous Mercury in the Mexico City Metropolitan Area

Total Gaseous Mercury (TGM) in ambient air at several locations within Mexico Valley Metropolitan Area (Zona Metropolitana del Valle de México, ZMVM, in Spanish) was measured during the Fall of 2002 and the first quarter of 2003. Among these locations were Tecamachalco (19°26'N; 99°13'W), San Agustín (19°31'N; 99°01'W), Xalostoc (19°31'N; 99°04'W) and Iztapalapa (19°21'N; 99°04'W). San Agustín and Xalostoc border the State of Mexico. Iztapalapa contains CENICA's monitoring station, and Mercury was one of the parameters measured here during the MCMA-2003 field campaign of the atmospheric chemistry taking place in ZMVM in April of 2003. This last site was used to monitor Mercury during three different seasons. The reported concentrations of Mercury vapor were measured continuously using cold vapor Atomic Fluorescence Spectroscopy (Tekran 2537A analyzer), with a detection limit of 0.10 ng·m-3 and a monitoring frequency of five minutes. The average TGM concentrations reported were 13.42, 10.22, 8.46 and 34.2 ng·m-3 for Iztapalapa in the months of September, October and November of 2002 and April of 2003 during the MCMA-2003 field campaign, respectively. For Tecamachalco, a concentration of 49.67 ng·m-3 was reported in January, 11.3 ng·m-3, for San Agustín in February and 31.99 ng·m-3 for Xalostoc in March of 2003.The daily maximums, 24 hourly average, for the same periods are 223.5, 78.2, 31.4 and 503.75 ng·m-3 for Iztapalapa, 118.62 ng·m-3 for Tecamachalco, 83.4 ng·m-3 for San Agustín and 261.2 ng·m-3 for Xalostoc. According to Ontario's air quality standards, the threshold value for mercury vapor in ambient air is 2 mg·m-3 on a 30 day average (Mercury situation in Canada, Report # 2, Environment Canada, May 2002). According to these criteria, then, the data reported for Mexico City are within the allowed limits for ambient air, but still 22 times higher than those reported as background concentrations at pristine locations (de la Rosa D.A., Volke-Sepúlveda T., Solorzano G., Green C., Tordon R., and Beauchamp S., (2004), Survey of atmospheric total gaseous mercury in Mexico, Atmospheric Environment 38, 4839-4846). These TGM concentrations, measured during the different seasons occurring in the ZMVM, that is, rainy, cold dry and warm dry seasons, will allow us to establish through the integration of time series, block diagrams and the application of basic descriptive statistics, the temporal profile of TGM concentrations at the Iztapalapa, CENICA station during a seasonal year. Likewise, data from the other sites will let us compare the concentration levels among different areas in the ZMVM.