SEDL / STP / STP976-EB / STP26698S

A Demonstration of a Universal Kriging Program for Monitoring Sediments in Lakes

Lin, PCL
Mechanical engineer and senior environmental engineer, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Environmental Monitoring and Support Laboratory—Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH

Roesler, JF
Mechanical engineer and senior environmental engineer, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Environmental Monitoring and Support Laboratory—Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH

Pages: 10    Published: Jan 1988

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Abstract

The promulgation and implementation of Section 404 (b) of Public Law (PL) 92-500 (Federal Water Pollution Control Act Assessments of 1972) required the ecological evaluation of operations, such as dredging and filling, as they may impact navigable waters of the United States. One among a large number of factors that must be considered in the initiation of a sediment, soil, and water sampling program is how to characterize the area sampled. This factor has two aspects: the project area and sampling locations. In this study, a universal kriging technique to select the optimized sampling locations is presented. It is an optimization technique for interpolation and spatial averaging from sparse observation records. This method is applicable to any sampling problem when it uses observations of a random field at a number of points to obtain an estimate of the value of the field and the accuracy of the estimate at any point. It also restores the measured values as estimates at the data points, whereas other methods do not. An existing universal kriging program for the IBM-PC has been modified so that it not only estimates the value of the field and its variance at any location, but also draws contour maps. Using this information, one can determine the approximate maximum concentration of the field and also help improve sampling locations to yield more definitive data.