ABSTRACT
The determination of precision and accuracy is an important part of environmental analysis because it indicates the degree of bias or any error in the measurement. Quality assurance and quality control programs mandate that every laboratory follow a set of well-defined guidelines so as to achieve analytical results with a high degree of accuracy. There are three major areas in environmental where statistical concepts are applied. One is in the determination of precision or reproducibility of measurements using two types of control charts: accuracy charts and precision control charts. The other area of applications of statistical concepts is in the determination of method detection limits (MDL), mostly for the chromatography analyses of organic pollutants. Another area of environmental analyses where one may see the use of statistics is in the microbial analyses for the determination of coliform bacteria by the most probable number (MPN) method involving multiple tube fermentation techniques.
