MAPPING WET DEPOSITION OF ACIDIFYING COMPONENTS AND BASE CATIONS OVEREUROPE USING MEASUREMENTS

Precipitation concentrations of various acidifying components and base cations in 1989 on a European scale were obtained from national organ isations responsible for wet deposition monitoring in their countries and from the EMEP database. In total, results were gathered from 824 m onitoring locations scattered over Europe. Annual mean concentrations were corrected for the contribution of dry deposition onto the funnels of bulk samplers. Spatial analysis based on regionalised variable the ory revealed autocorrelation in all ion concentrations and reasonable bounded models were fitted to the experimental variograms. Maps of con centrations of acidifying components and base cations were compiled us ing the block-kriging interpolation technique. To obtain fluxes, conce ntrations were multiplied by long-term mean precipitation amounts from the EPA database. Wet deposition fluxes over Europe were mapped on a 50 x 50 km scale for nonmarine sulphate, nitrate, ammonium, hydrogen, chloride, sodium, magnesium, potassium and calcium. An extensive uncer tainty analysis was performed to assess the quality of the maps. Copyr ight (C) 1996 Elsevier Science Ltd.