Comparative assessment of regionalisation methods of monitored atmospheric deposition loads

The objective of this investigation is to assess the suitability of well-known regionalisation methods of data from existing deposition monitoring networks for use in water resources management. For this purpose a comparison of the applicability and accuracy of various regionalisation methods was made. A crucial point is the data demand of the various methods. In this investigation the deterministic and geostatistical methods inverse distance weighting (IDW), ordinary kriging (OK) and external drift kriging (EDK) as well as the chemical transport models METRAS-MUSCAT, EMEP, EDACS and EUTREND have been characterised and evaluated. The methods IDW and OK have been applied to the investigation areas—the German Federal States of Lower Saxony and Saxony. An evaluation of these methods was carried out with a cross-validation procedure. The result was in most cases a higher accuracy for the OK method. The EDK method has been investigated in order to find suitable drift variables from the parameters precipitation amount, altitude and wind direction. With help of a correlation analysis a suitable drift variable could not be found. After the application of OK, verification was carried out by a comparison of the estimated data set with an independently determined data set. The result was a relatively smaller deviation of the estimated data set. The investigation considers data from routine monitoring networks as well as networks for special applications and has been carried out on the basis of monitoring networks of the two states. The investigated database was wet and bulk deposition of the substances NH4+, SO42−, NO3−, Na+, Pb2+, and Cd2+ in Lower Saxony and SO42− in Saxony. From this, a consistent database of bulk deposition data was built. From all applied methods OK proved to cope best with the data deficiencies that were found.