Statistical Framework for Recreational Water Quality Criteria and Monitoring

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Office of Water is in the process of establishing revised ambient water quality criteria for fresh recreational waters in accordance with the Clean Water Act of 1977 and the Beaches Act of 2000.

These criteria will be based upon results from new epidemiological studies being conducted at the Great Lakes beaches.

Criticism of the current EPA criteria have included observations that they do not provide real time protection, do not adequately take into account children's health, use the wrong statistics for the criteria, and rely on inadequate sampling.It is hoped that the current studies will provide some answers to these criticisms.

However they cannot provide the answers on their own.

A framework for developing these data into practical recreational water criteria must be established.

The provision of such a framework, in the context of these studies, is the aim of this book, which will provide details on traditional and novel sampling designs.

The book will focus on practical statistical methods for monitoring water quality and will also cover risk characterization, empirical modeling and sensitivity analysis and measures of robustness.