Expert and Statistic Assessment of Water Quality

Abstract

A reliable quantitative assessment of the quality of river waters is difficult due to high variability of indexes being controlled and absence of information about the empirical function of the distribution of their probabilities. It is shown that in such a situation the expert-statistical method based on probabilistic interpretation of different variants of the Harrington desirability function may be useful. Such an approach makes is possible to solve the set problem using the Harrington scale for individual pollutants and for their combination with different hazard classes using a complex multiplicative criterion. The proposed approach of the expert-statistical assessment is illustrated by a practical example which may be recommended for general use.