Report on the development of sensor technologies for continuous and/or semi-continuous atmospheric mercury measurements of Hg(0)/GEM, Hg(II)/GOM in ambient air

Recently, global traceability and measurements of Hg have been addressed with a network approach using automated and/or semi-automated systems for sampling and detection of Hg in air and wet deposition. Based on the commonly used procedures for the determination of Hg in ambient air within the GMOS global network, the corresponding costs to run more than 40 monitoring sites are extremely high, especially in remote regions such as Antarctica or in pristine areas that do not have a basic infrastructure (i.e., no clean labs, poor power supply) as well as trained operators. On long term, the management sustainability of global or continental scale monitoring networks for measuring Hg in air samples depends very much on our ability to develop advanced sensor capable to measure total Hg (THg) or even better speciated mercury concentrations. These advanced sensors should be robust, traceable and should not require gas carrier, significant energy supply and highly qualified technical expertise. Having the above in mind, our goal is to present preliminary results on research strategies adopted for the development of newly sensor technologies with the aim to develop a prototype sensor based on the advantage of not requiring any pre-treatment of samples, it is very sensitive, can reach ultra trace level, does not require significant power supply and is not expensive. The Deliverable 1.2.11 provides a report on the development of sensor technologies for continuous and/or semi-continuous atmospheric mercury measurements of Hg(0)/GEM, Hg(II)/GOM in ambient air.