Trend analysis of monthly acid rain data - '80 -'86

• Main Author: Wu, Shiying
• Language: English
• Published: University of British Columbia 2010
• Subjects: Acid rain > Statistics; Trend surface analysis
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/2429/28357

Three-way median polish is used to model the monthly concentrations of three kinds of ions in precipitation, namely sulphate, nitrate and hydrogen ions. In contrast to previous findings that the wet acid deposition had decreased from late 70's to early 80's, the results suggest that there is a V-shaped trend for wet acid deposition during the period of 1980 -1986 with the change point around 1983. Strong seasonality is also discovered by the analysis. Nonparametric monotone trend tests are performed on the data collected from 1980 to 1986 and on the data collected from 1983 to 1986 separately. The results are consistent with the findings from the median polish approach. A nonparametric slope estimate of the trend is obtained for each monitoring station. Based on these estimates, the slope estimate is obtained by Kriging interpolation for each integer degree grid point of longitude and latitude across the 48 conterminous states in the United States. Also, a geographical pattern in the data is suggested by hierarchical clustering and by median polishing. === Science, Faculty of === Statistics, Department of === Graduate