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Environmental Technology Verification Report: Pesticide spray drift reduction technologies--Evaluation of the verification protocol for low and high speed wind tunnel testing
Citation:
RTI INTERNATIONAL, Alion Science & Technology, AND USDA-ARS College Station. Environmental Technology Verification Report: Pesticide spray drift reduction technologies--Evaluation of the verification protocol for low and high speed wind tunnel testing. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Washington, DC, EPA/600/R-12/057, 2012.
Impact/Purpose:
ETV protocol
Description:
Pesticide spray drift is defined as the movement of spray droplets through the air at the time of application or soon thereafter from the target site to any non- or off-target site, excluding pesticide movements by erosion, migration, volatility, or windblown soil particles after application. EPA established a Drift Reduction Technology (DRT) project under EPA’s Environmental Technology Verification (ETV) Program. Before the pesticide spray DRT generic verification protocol (GVP) can be used for verification testing, it requires testing and evaluation. For the low and high speed tests representing ground and aerial applications, respectively, the validity of and applicability of the pesticide spray DRT protocol were evaluated using two test nozzles and one reference nozzle. Low speed wind tunnel tests did not achieve all the spray size distribution, spray flux, and spray deposition data quality indicator goals (DQIGs). However, the data collected were adequate for revising the low speed wind tunnel portion of the DRT GVP, the main goal of this research. High speed wind tunnel tests achieved the most important DQIGs. This report provides stakeholders the validation data in an unbiased manner so they can provide U.S. EPA suggestions to revise and improve the GVP.