Influence of hail suppression systems over silver content in the environment in Aragón (Spain). I: Rainfall and soils.

In several countries, hail is considered as the most harmful climatic phenomenon from an agricultural perspective. The surroundings of the Gallocanta Lake (North-East Spain), is one of the areas where the storms affecting the Ebro Valley are formed. For this reason, silver iodide from hail suppression systems has been emitted to the atmosphere for half a century. Nowadays, there is an increasing social concern about the potential environmental consequences of this activity, which has promoted the analysis of the influence of hail suppression systems regarding the amount of silver concentration in the ecosystem. This study focuses on silver atmospheric deposition and its accumulation in soils. To this end, silver concentrations in rainfall (5 gauges, 16 samples per site, from April 2017 to March 2019) and soils (72 samples) distributed across the hail suppression network managed by the Anti-hail Consortium of Aragón, were analysed. The results show that the amount of silver is much higher in rainfall gauges and soils close to ground-based silver iodide generators (85 μg/m

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Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.