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It has been two decades since environmental science, environmental engineering,
and environmental consulting took root as major disciplines and professions
throughout the developed world. The learning curve has been steep as it relates
to the previously unrecognized physics of contaminant transport. Today those
principles are usually well understood by a mature army of environmental
professions.
An area that has lagged in full comprehension among the practitioners in these
fields is an understanding and awareness of the hardware for measuring the physical
and chemical characteristics of contaminated sites. The application of these
instruments and methodologies to characterize the solid, liquid, and gaseous
chemical content within a transport media are not well understood.
Professionals have long relied on personal experience, diverse journal articles,
and manufacturer’s advertisements and catalogs to choose efficient and accurate
means of obtaining the necessary field data to characterize a site. This has resulted
in too narrow a focus in the development of appropriate remediation programs and
monitoring protocols.
More than three dozen talented environmental professionals who are experienced
and adept at extracting the most telling and accurate data from the ‘‘field’’
have come together in this book to catalog nearly all the equipment and techniques
that are available to modern scientists, engineers, and technicians.
This has been a fulfilling and rewarding effort: the gathering of the best and
brightest professionals across many continents to share their expertise. We have
asked them to describe the basic science, be it physics, chemistry, biology,
hydrology, or computer data logging, that supports their field analysis followed
by detailed explanations of the various hardware in use today. In most cases the
authors offer descriptions of typical case studies in which the equipment was
successfully utilized. |
