Quality analysis of U.S. geological survey precipitation chemistry data for New York

Peters, Norman E.

doi:10.1016/0004-6981(84)90090-8

Cited by 4 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 9 publications

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“…The data used in this study are the sulfate concentrations and precipitation quantities from each of these collected samples. The data were screened for obvious errors as described by Peters (1984) and processed to produce a monthly time series of precipitation rates in centimeters per day and sulfate deposition rates in grams per square meter per day. This was done by the following rule: for every collected sample, a midpoint date (half way between the beginning and ending dates for the sample collection) was determined and the sample was assigned to the month in which that midpoint occurred.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

DETECTABILITY OF STEP TRENDS IN THE RATE OF ATMOSPHERIC DEPOSITION OF SULFATE¹

Hirsch¹,

Gilroy

1985

J American Water Resour Assoc

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A method is presented to assist policy makers in determining the combination of number of sampling stations and number of years of sampling necessary to state with a given probability that a step reduction in atmospheric deposition rates of a given magnitude has occurred at a pre-specified time. This pre-specified time would typically be the time at which a sulfate emission control program took effect, and the given magnitude of reduction is some percentage change in deposition rate one might expect to occur as a result of the emission control. In order to determine this probability of detection, a stochastic model of sulfate deposition rates is developed, based on New York State bulk collection network data. The model considers the effect of variation in precipitation, seasonal variations, serial correlation, and site-to-site (cross) correlation. A nonparametric statistical test which is well suited to detection of step changes in such multi-site data sets is developed. It is related to the Mann-Whitney Rank-Sum test. The test is used in Monte Car10 simulations along with the stochastic model to derive statistical power functions. These power functions describe the probability of detecting (&0.05) a step trend in deposition rate as a function of the size of the step-trend, record length before and after the step-trend, and the number of stations sampled. The results show that, for an area the size of New York State, very little power is gained by increasing the number of stations beyond about eight. The results allow policy makers to determine the tradeoff between the cost of monitoring and time required to detect a step-trend of a given magnitude with a given probability.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%