SELECTION OF ANALYTICAL VARIABLES TO OPTIMIZE LABORATORY EFFORTS IN FUTURE GROUNDWATER STUDIES

The main objective of this work was to develop a way to select a subse t of analytical variables from one initial broad study to monitor grou ndwater quality. The study was applied to one Spanish area. The work w as focused on selecting actual physico-chemical variables rather than using typical multivariate techniques as a way to reduce costs, effort , necessities facility and staff workloads. Several chemometric multiv ariate techniques such as principal components analysis, factor analys is, singular value decomposition of raw data matrix and procrustes rot ation were used as the mathematical means to achieve the objectives. O f the initial 29 variables analysed, six of them were selected to desc ribe the system during five seasonal samplings and it is hoped that ea ch season subset will allow the monitoring of groundwater quality duri ng future seasons.