An Attempt to Interpret the Spread of Element Concentration in Antarctic Surface Snow: The Same Element in a Given...

Sampling surface snow on a large test field always leads to a spread of analyte concentration data which partly follows a Gaussian distribution and partly a rectangular one as can be observed from the analysis of literature data. The spread depends on the nonuniformity of the air-snow interface in the field and on the extent of reproducibility of all the procedures used from sampling to analysis. Consequently a sample relevant to a restricted surface might be poorly representative of the surrounding area. Contamination of the sample during the gathering and storing steps is assumed to be the main source of nonrandom results (outliers). Using various statistical tools we were able to evaluate which part of the spread was due to the snow surface nonuniformity in the case of many samples collected in the same test field. In the case of samples gathered in different geographical areas, the possibility of finding correlations among points is greatly enhanced when three or more analytes are considered for each sample. When the same correlation is found for some analytes and a variable tentatively tested, information can be gained about the source of chemical content of snow samples. The use of UV pretreatment of snow samples has been proven to cut down the interference of organics on the electrochemical process in DPASV, allowing one to obtain accurate and reproducible data.