Abstract
The analysis of nitrate in seawater and hypersalinewaters should take account of a significant “salteffect”. Procedures developed for fresh water andmarine waters must be applied cautiously to highlysaline waters. The most widely used standard methodfor the determination of nitrate-nitrogen (NO3-N)in fresh and marine waters involves the quantitativereduction of nitrate by the Cd column techniquefollowed by colorimetric procedures. In our study,three approaches to estimate NO3-N in highlysaline waters were examined. The first involveddilution. This approach overcame the salt effect butdilution limited the detection of low concentrationsof nitrate in highly saline waters. The secondinvolved the use of standard nitrate solutions insaline water. This method is not recommended becauseof nitrate impurities in AR grade salts. The third-and preferred approach-involved the use of standardadditions. “Spikes” of a known volume of NO3-Nstandard solution were added to natural saline waters. Nitrate values estimated by the standard additionmethod were used to calculate an equation for salterror correction at different salinities applicable towaters with the same relative ionic composition asseawater. This could then be used to correct nitratedeterminations in highly saline waters where standardsmade in distilled water were used for calibration.Many previously published data for NO3-N insaline water used methods of analysis which do nottake account of salt error and are therefore probablyin error.
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Ghassemzadeh, F., Sherwood , J., Geddes, M.C. et al. The analysis of nitrate in highly saline waters. International Journal of Salt Lake Research 6, 269–278 (1997). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1009008120817
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1009008120817