Acidity and organic carbon in lake water: variability and estimation of means

✍ Scribed by John F. Boyle

• Publisher: Springer Netherlands
• Year: 1991
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 445 KB
• Volume: 6
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0921-2728
• DOI: 10.1007/bf00153733

✦ Synopsis

The demand for a single value to characterize the pH (and other chemical variables) of a lake, in order to calibrate palaeolimnological reconstructions, requires an answer to the question of whether means should be of untransformed or log data. The temporal frequency distributions of acidity and organic carbon in seven rivers and lakes (surface samples) in Norway are approximately lognormal. Thus log means describe the distributions better than untransformed means. Estimated standard deviations, which are similar for the rivers and lakes, are independent of the mean values. Restricting observations to the autumn does not result in better estimation of mean annual values.