skip to main content
OSTI.GOV title logo U.S. Department of Energy
Office of Scientific and Technical Information

Title: Environmental applications of chemometrics

Book ·
OSTI ID:6081895

The increasing availability of instrumentation capable of continuous sampling and real-time multicomponent analysis has led to what one of the authors aptly describes as data burdened researchers. Nowhere has this effect been more visible than in the realm of environmental analyses. The complexity of environmental samples has led to the implementation of extensive monitoring networks and has resulted in the generation of a vast database of information. In this book, the editors have compiled 19 separate papers dealing with mathematical methods by which useful information may be extracted from this database. Each of these 19 chapters deals with a particular application of chemometrics to an environmental problem. The chapters range in length from 7 to 30 pages, with an average of 14 pages. A wide range of applications is illustrated, including the distribution of PCB residues in human adipose tissue, characterization of rain water composition, identification of mineral phases in oil shales, interpretation of a water quality database, and contributions of specific sources to the ambient aerosol. A diversity of computational approaches was similarly represented with the SIMCA method, partial least-squares solutions, fuzzy C-varieties of pattern recognition, and Kriging being invoked about as often as the now-classical principal components analysis. Several of the chapters deal exclusively with the mathematical aspects of various chemometric methodologies. The quality of the papers presented was quite good, and an up-to-date set of references, with many from 1984 and a few from 1985, adds to the value that this work will have for researchers in environmental chemometrics.

OSTI ID:
6081895
Resource Relation:
Other Information: From review by Albert C. Censullo, California Polytechnic State Univ., in J. Am. Chem. Soc., Vol. 108, No. 2 (22 Oct 1986)
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English