A. INTRODUCTION
1. Environmental Analysis
Environmental analysis, as used in these notes, is the chemical (or physical) characterization of some component of the natural or engineered environment. One may speak of four facets to environmental analysis:
1. Analytical Methods
2. Sampling Protocol
3. Quality Control
4. Data Analysis
The first, analytical methods, is what one most commonly associates with chemical analysis of the environment. It is the recipe or set of laboratory procedures one follows in order to obtain a signal that can be related to the concentration of the analyte. Analytical methods are presented in Chapters XV-XXII, and grouped according to the instrument or apparatus used. The second facet, sampling protocol, is sometimes trivial, yet sometimes very important and complex. Sampling is the means by which a subset of the environmental matrix of interest is selected, stored and transported to the laboratory for analysis (Chapter XIII). Then, quality control, is a set of procedures which are intended to warn the analyst when his/her analytical method is not working properly (Chapter XII). Some of these procedures may be implicitly writted into the analytical method. Finally, data analysis, is required to place the analytical results into the framework of a numerical value with uncertainty. Statistical theory plays an important role in this process, and this subject is treated in Chapter XXIII.
2. Analytical Methods
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