Monitoring studies of Augusta bay marine waters

The monitoring of water quality today provides a great quantity of data consisting of the values of the parameters measured as a tunction of bme or as spatial function. In the marine environment, and especially in the suspended material, increasing importance is being given to the presence of particular pollution indices. With the increase in the number of sampling points, the amount of data increases and examining the results and their consequent interpretation becomes more difficult. To overcome such difficulties, numerous chemometric techniques have been introduced in environmental chemistry, such as Principal Component Analysis (PCA). The use of the PCA in this work has been applied to the analysis of twenty three different sampling points in three seasonal sampling cruises in the same year. This led to recognition of the influence and the localisation of wastewaters in the Augusta bay after measunng the water pollution parameters. The PCA made evident the difference between some sampling sites whose data were initially thought to be similar where the presence of hot industrial water discharge or urban wastewater determines the permanent water quality. Furthermore, it has allowed a choice of more significant parameters for monitoring programs and more representative sampling site locations.