Abstract
In a soil remediation project the amount of polluted soil that will be removed seldom equals the total amount of polluted soil. This is because the decision to remove the soil depends not only on the characteristics of the polluted soil body, but also on the current environmental policy and on the technical and economic context of the remediation project. Nevertheless an estimate of the amount of polluted soil is essential.
Probability kriging is a non-parametric geostatistical technique that is suitable for estimating the amount of polluted soil. For volume estimation purposes two pieces of information are essential. Firstly the concentrations of the pollutant with regard to different remedial actions or to different policy-views have to be known. Secondly the level of probability above which some remedial action becomes inevitable must be known. In the described case-study — soil pollution by atmospheric emissions from a pigment factory — probability kriging was used to map the lead contamination in terms of conditional probabilities that given thresholds are exceeded.
It was found that in a large area of about 30 km2 around the pigment factory the probability of exceeding the 150 mg/kg threshold is over 80 %. The pattern of concentric circles around the factory obtained when estimating the probabilities of exceeding the 300 mg/kg threshold is exactly what is expected in a case of atmospheric deposition.
The potential for working with more than one cut-off level makes the technique an important management tool in decision making.
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© 1993 Kluwer Academic Publishers
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Okx, J.P., Leenaers, H., Krzanowski, R.M. (1993). Probability Kriging as a Decision Support Tool for Local Soil Pollution Problems. In: Soares, A. (eds) Geostatistics Tróia ’92. Quantitative Geology and Geostatistics, vol 5. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-1739-5_53
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-1739-5_53
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