Measurement uncertainty

The reporting of measurement uncertainty has recently undergone a major harmonization whereby characteristics of a measurement method obtained during establishment and application are combined componentwise. For example, the sometimes-pesky systematic error is included. A bias component of uncertainty can be often easily established as the uncertainty in the bias. However, beyond simply arriving at a value for uncertainty, meaning to this uncertainty if needed can sometimes be developed in terms of prediction confidence in uncertainty-based intervals covering what is to be measured. To this end, a link between concepts of accuracy and uncertainty is established through a simple yet accurate approximation to a random variable known as the non-central Student's t-distribution.