Statistics for Environmental Engineers

Statistics for Environmental Engineers covers a wide range of subject areas, some of which are not typically found in textbooks on statistics. The book contains 54 chapters, which are typically 6 to 10 pages in length. The intention was to make each chapter independent of the others and able to stand alone. Books on statistics for non-statisticians can be terse and still cover the necessary material well—an example is Halstead (1966), the text used for the sophomore-level statistics class I took in 1970. However, the result in the present instance is chapters that are unnecessarily limited in scope, so that a complete discussion of some topics, such as prediction of upper confidence limits for a data set based on a limited set of samples, often takes several chapters. The reader would be better served if the chapters were longer and of greater scope.

The intended audience for the book is `environmental engineers' in the sense used by civil engineers—that is, water and wastewater treatment engineers. Hence, most of the examples and end-of-chapter exercises concern problems and data types typical of situations encountered in water and wastewater treatment rather than those encountered in environmental engineering in the more generic …