Chemical characterization of fog and rain water collected at the eastern Andes cordillera

Abstract

Abstract. During a three month period in 2003 and 2004, the chemistry of fog and rainwater were studied at the "El Tiro" site in a tropical mountain forest ecosystem in Ecuador, South America. The fogwater samples were collected using a passive fog collector, and for the rain water, a standard rain sampler was employed. For all samples, electric conductivity, pH, and the concentrations of NH4+, K+, Na+, Ca2+, Mg2+, Cl-, NO3-, PO43-, and SO42-, were measured. For each fog sample, a 5 day back trajectory was calculated by the use of the HYSPLIT model. Two types of trajectories occurred. One type was characterized by advection of air masses from the East over the Amazonian basin, the other trajectory arrived one from the West after significant travel time over the Pacific Ocean. We found considerably higher ion concentrations in fogwater samples than in rain samples. Median pH values are 4.58 for fog water, and 5.26 for the rain samples, respectively. The median electric conductivity was 23 µS cm-1 for the fog and 6 µS cm-1 for the rain. The concentrations of all analysed ions were relatively low compared to other mountainous sites (Weathers et al., 1988; Elias et al., 1995; Schemenauer et al., 1995; Wrzesinsky and Klemm, 2000; Zimmermann and Zimmermann, 2002). The continent samples exhibit higher concentrations of most ions as compared to the pacific samples.