Geographic consistency

Raw data must be analyzed and transformed into a format useful for specific purposes. Summary tables, graphs, and geographic distributions are some of the formats used for data display. Air quality information often consists of a large body of data collected at a variety of locations and over different seasons. Table 15-3 shows the tabular format used by the California Air Resources Board to reduce ozone hourly measurements to a format which shows information about compliance with air quality standards (6). The format has location, maximum values, annual means, and number of occurrences of hourly values above a given concentration as a function of the month of the year. One can quickly determine which areas are violating a standard, at what time of the year elevated concentrations are occurring, and the number of good data points collected. 

Manufacturers need to have confidence that a continual uninterrupted supply of raw material can be sustained throughout the life cycle of a product. It is of equal importance that the feedstock should not be restricted by geographical and climatic conditions or that yield does not dramatically vary when harvested in different locations and at a particular time of the year. The key to an increased usage of natural products by industry is in the control of the above variables so that the end performance of the product remains consistent. 

Distribution systems can be operated at pressures up to 7 bar but it is practice to operate at as low a pressure as is consistent with supplying users with the agreed supply pressure, which is 21 mbar at the meter inlet in many cases. Pressure reduction takes place at take-offs from the transmission system, at district governor installations serving a large number of users within a geographical area and, for many larger users, at the users premises. 

The overall usefulness of terpene data for defining geographical races is shown in the comparison of profiles of eastern and western white spruce (see von Rudloff, 1975, for specific citations). Leaf oil analysis revealed consistent differences in... 

Clustered sites would be located within a single ecoregion or at least have similar ecological characteristics (e.g., southeastern coastal plain streams), and would consist of a series of geographically proximal locations (approximately 10 to 20 water bodies) where similar atmospheric loads (or load reductions) are anticipated. Cluster sites would be sampled on a routine basis (e.g., quarterly) for a prolonged period of time. Individual sites within a cluster would be specifically chosen to represent a range of site characteristics that are known to affect Hg cycling (e g., pH, DOC,... 

SimpleBox is a nested multimedia environmental fate model in which the environmental compartments are represented by homogeneous boxes. It consists of five spatial scales a regional scale, a continental scale and a global scale consisting of three parts, reflecting arctic, moderate and tropic geographic zones (Fig. 5)... 

The experiment conducted by the Rand Corporation in the late 1970s, designed as a large-scale experiment in order to overcome this methodological difficulty, is already a classic in the field of health economics.22 It consisted in allocating 16 different 3-5-year health insurance schemes at random to a broad sample of people distributed geographically in six different areas of the USA. The co-payment rates varied from 0 per cent to 95 per cent, depending on the scheme and the services provided. The data supplied by the... 

A more detailed study of the geographical distribution in a high-radon area was made in nine municipalities in the winter 1984-85 (Castr n et al.,1985). A second study, consisting of more than 3,000 houses in 32 municipalities will be completed in 1986. 

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