USGS: USGS TWRI 4-A3
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Title
| Statistical Methods in Water Resources |
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Author
| Helsel, D.R. and Hirsch, R.M. |
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Abstract/Summary Statement
| This book began as class notes for a course we teach on applied statistical methods to hydrologists of the Water Resources Division, U. S. Geological Survey (USGS). It reflects our attempts to teach statistical methods which are appropriate for analysis of water resources data. As interest in this course has grown outside of the USGS, incentive grew to develop the material into a textbook. The topics covered are those we feel are of greatest usefulness to the practicing water resources scientist. Yet all topics can be directly applied to many other types of environmental data. This book is not a stand-alone text on statistics, or a text on statistical hydrology. For example, in addition to this material we use a textbook on introductory statistics in the USGS training course. As a consequence, discussions of topics such as probability theory required in a general statistics textbook will not be found here. Derivations of most equations are not presented. Important tables included in all general statistics texts, such as quantiles of the normal distribution, are not found here. Neither are details of how statistical distributions should be fitted to flood data -- these are adequately covered in numerous books on statistical hydrology. We have instead chosen to emphasize topics not always found in introductory statistics textbooks, and often not adequately covered in statistical textbooks for scientists and engineers. Tables included here, for example, are those found more often in books on nonparametric statistics than in books likely to have been used in college courses for engineers. This book points the environmental and water resources scientist to robust and nonparametric statistics, and to exploratory data analysis. We believe that the characteristics of environmental (and perhaps most other 'real') data drive analysis methods towards use of robust and nonparametric methods. |
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Table of Contents
| Chapters: 1. Summarizing data 2. Graphical data analysis 3. Describing uncertainty 4. Hypothetical tests 5. Differences between two independent groups 6. Matched-pair tests 7. Comparing several independent groups 8. Correlation 9. Simple linear regression 10. Alternative methods to regression 11. Multiple regression 12. Trend analysis 13. Methods for data below the reporting limit 14. Discrete relationships 15. Regression for discrete responses 16. Presentation graphics References Appendicies |
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Citation
| Helsel, D.R. and Hirsch, R. M., 2002. Statistical Methods in Water Resources Techniques of Water Resources Investigations, Book 4, chapter A3 (Hydrologic Analysis and Interpretation). U.S. Geological Survey. September 2002. 522 pp. |
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Method Source
| USGS |
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Source Organization Country
| USA |
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Publication Year
| 2002 |
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Special Notes
| This book is available only as an electronic publication and is not for sale. This electronic book reference is intended to give more robust information for analysis of water resources data. This book is not a stand-alone text on statistics, or a text on statistical hydrology. There is an errata sheet for this report. Data sets for Appendix C area available in both ASCII and Excel formats. |
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Item Type
| Book |
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Publication Source Type
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Government Agency (Federal, USA) |
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Purpose
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Data analysis |
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Design or Data Analysis Objectives
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Communities & populations Compare locations Compare treatments Compliance with a threshold Continuous (sensor) data Exploring/summarizing data Flow statistics Flow-adjusted concentrations Loads & fluxes Source identification Spatial trends Temporal trends |
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Complexity
| Medium |
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Media Emphasized
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Biological Groundwater Surface Water |
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Media Subcategory
| |
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Special Topics
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Assessing and managing autocorrelation Characterizing the uncertainty of an estimated value Evaluating whether data follow a certain (e.g., normal) distribution Handling nondetects Identifying outliers Measurements taken using a water quality sensor |
