Regional Analysis of Wet Deposition for Effects Research

摘要

The basis for regional analysis of precipitation amount, concentration and deposition is investigated. When performing such a spatial analysis, key issues are the data selection, data compositing, the interpolation technique, and the uncertainty of the results. Sources of data on precipitation amount and chemical composition are presented along with procedures for screening the chemical data. A review of recent work reveals that different scientists select different data sets and that data selection plays an important role in the resulting maps. Important issues in data preprocessing include temporal resolution, data stratification into geographic regions, and choosing between direct and indirect methods for interpolating wet deposition. Available spatial interpolation techniques are discussed. The geostatistical technique, kriging, is discussed in detail to allow other researchers the benefit of previous applications to precipitation chemistry. Procedures for generating and checking uncertainty estimates are discussed.