Samplinghelper a web-based tool to assess the reliability of sampling strategies in sewers and receiving waters

摘要

Sampling is a key step in the analysis of chemical compounds. It is particularly important in thenenvironmental field, for example for wastewater effluents, wet-weather discharges or streams innwhich the flows and concentrations vary greatly over time. In contrast to the improvements that havenoccurred in analytical measurement, developments in the field of sampling are less active. However,nsampling errors may exceed by an order of magnitude those related to analytical processes. Wenproposed an Internet-based application based on a sampling theory to identify and quantify thenerrors in the process of taking samples. This general theory of sampling, already applied to differentnareas, helps to answer questions related to the number of samples, their volume, theirnrepresentativeness, etc. The use of the internet to host this application facilitates use of theoreticalntools and raise awareness of the uncertainties related to sampling. An example is presented, whichnhighlights the importance of the sampling step in the quality of analytical results.