Abstract: The application of octanol-air partition coefficient(KOA) in describing the fate of organic pollutants in the environment and the methods to determine or predict KOA values since 1990s are reviewed.KOA is a key descriptor for describing the partition of organic pollutants and especially persistent organic pollutants(POPs) between air and environmental organic phases.The experimental measurement and theoretical estimation of KOA were developed,but many more KOA values and their temperature dependence data of other POPs leave undetermined.It is needed to develop simpler method to estimate KOA values and their temperature dependence which will be applied to the evaluation on their behavior in the environment.