1.1 This guide covers the context of groundwater monitoring at waste disposal facilities. Regulations have required statistical methods as the basis for investigating potential environmental impact due to waste disposal facility operation. Owner/operators must perform a statistical analysis on a quarterly or semiannual basis. A statistical test is performed on each of many constituents (for example, 10 to 50 or more) for each of many wells (5 to 100 or more). The result is potentially hundreds, and in some cases, a thousand or more statistical comparisons performed on each monitoring event. Even if the false positive rate for a single test is small (for example, 18201;%), the possibility of failing at least one test on any monitoring event is virtually guaranteed. This assumes you have done the correct statistic in the first place.
1.2 This guide is intended to assist regulators and industry in developing statistically powerful groundwater monitoring programs for waste disposal facilities. The purpose of this guide is to detect a potential groundwater impact from the facility at the earliest possible time while simultaneously minimizing the probability of falsely concluding that the facility has impacted groundwater when it has not.
1.3 When applied inappropriately, existing regulation and guidance on statistical approaches to groundwater monitoring often suffer from a lack of statistical clarity and often implement methods that will either fail to detect contamination when it is present (a false negative result) or conclude that the facility has impacted groundwater when it has not (a false positive). Historical approaches to this problem have often sacrificed one type of error to maintain control over the other. For example, some regulatory approaches err on the side of conservatism, keeping false negative rates near zero while false positive rates approach 1008201;%.
1.4 The purpose of this guide is to illustrate a statistical groundwater monitoring strategy that minimizes both false negative and false positive rates without sacrificing one for the other.
ASTM D6312-98(2012)e1 history
2017ASTM D6312-17 Standard Guide for Developing Appropriate Statistical Approaches for Groundwater Detection Monitoring Programs at Waste Disposal Facilities
1998ASTM D6312-98(2012)e1 Standard Guide for Developing Appropriate Statistical Approaches for Groundwater Detection Monitoring Programs
1998ASTM D6312-98(2005) Standard Guide for Developing Appropriate Statistical Approaches for Ground-Water Detection Monitoring Programs
1998ASTM D6312-98 Standard Guide for Developing Appropriate Statistical Approaches for Ground-Water Detection Monitoring Programs