For many important classes of pesticides including phenylurea herbicides (PUHs) and triazines, photosensitized transformation may be the only relevant elimination process in surface waters. In this study, the dissolved organic matter (DOM) mediated phototransformation of PUHs has been investigated in laboratory and field experiments. The results indicate that, in surface waters, the photosensitized transformation of PUHs may be significant and occurs primarily by an initial one-electron oxidation most likely involving excited triplet states of DOM (3{sup left}DOM{sup}*) constituents. Using isoproturon and diuron as model compounds, it is shown that for a given DOM, quantum yield factors determined in the laboratory at a few selected wavelengths can be used to quantify the overall DOM-mediated phototransformation of a given PUH under sunlight irradiation. Furthermore, it is demonstrated that this process can be modeled for a given surface water, by applying the program GCSOLAR and a simple algorithm for cloud cover for quantification of average daily light intensities. Finally, the model has been successfully applied to predict vertical concentration profiles of isoproturon and diuron in a small lake in Switzerland. To our knowledge, this is the first study in which DOM-mediated phototransformation of organic pollutants has been quantitatively validated in the field.
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