This study is conducted at the Trail Road Landfill, located in Nepean, Ontario, Canada. The objective is to investigate the leachate characteristics of changing spatial-temporal patterns in a landfill groundwater environment by comprehensive analyses of annual spatial data. Exploratory statistical data analysis identified the association of B (boron) with K, NH3 and TKN. Raster layers (maps) are created based on the concentrations of required variables in each time interval (year). In this

more »

... , it is notable that the raster data layers are used instead of discrete well data. Several change detection methods are applied to determine the spatial and temporal changes of B and its associated variables and to identify the well locations where the changes occurred. These included post-classification visualization, principal component analysis, standard deviation and unsupervised classification (clustering) methods. The suitability of these methods is also discussed. The results determined that during the 1993-95 time period the concentrations of B and its associates was initially increasing, and then decreased substantially. In summary, the study analysed characteristics of pollutants in landfill site groundwater environmental monitoring by using raster data in different change detection methods, and discussed the suitability of the applied methods. The same methodology and analysis techniques can be applied to other variables in similar environmental monitoring studies.