Corporate Training By Zack Academy - EPAs New Unified Guidance-Statistical Analysis of Groundwater Monitoring Data

Why Should You Attend This EPAs New Unified Guidance-Statistical Analysis of Groundwater Monitoring Data Course?

This EPAs New Unified Guidance-Statistical Analysis of Groundwater Monitoring Data course discusses the core elements of the EPA's first major revision to its groundwater statistical guidance in almost 20 years. Presented by the primary author of the revision, this course will showcase new features of the guidance, as well as recommended changes to current statistical practice. In addition to reviewing the design and evaluation of statistical programs for groundwater monitoring, participants will also learn the benefits of checking their assumptions in order to run the most effective statistical tests.

Who Should Attend?

This course is intended for RCRA regulators, site operators and/or consultants responsible for compliance with regulations for groundwater monitoring. It may also be useful for parties that are responsible for statistical treatment of environmental data in other regulatory programs.

Prerequisites:  A background in statistics, RCRA, and previous EPA guidance are helpful, though not required.

Topics to be Covered Include:

• Key Assumptions in Groundwater Testing
  
• Normality, stationarity, data independence
• RCRA Groundwater Statistical Framework
• Monitoring stages
• Balancing statistical errors
• Statistically significant increases (SSI)
• Power Curves
• Importance of Background
• Establishing and implementing background
• Strategies for Compliance Monitoring
• Testing under unstable conditions
• Comparisons to background data
• Statistical Design in Detection Monitoring
• Multiple comparisons, site-wide false positive rates
• Parametric vs. Non-parametric tests
• Interwell vs. Intrawell tests
• Incorporating Retesting
• What to do with Difficult Data 
  • Outliers, non-detects
  • Spatial variation, temporal correlation
• Recommended Statistical Methods 
• • Prediction limits, control charts
  • Trend tests
  • Confidence intervals

Meet the Instructor:

Dr. Kirk Cameron is the founder and president of MacStat Consulting, Ltd. in Colorado Springs, Colorado, a statistical consulting firm specializing in environmental statistical applications and problem-solving. He has over 20 years of experience in teaching and consulting to USEPA, DoD, DoE, the US Air Force, and private environmental and medical firms. Dr. Cameron is the primary author of both USEPA's Interim Final Guidance document for the statistical analysis of groundwater monitoring data (1992) and the recently published major update to this guidance entitled the Unified Guidance (2009). He has designed training courses on the statistical analysis of groundwater monitoring data and presented to regulators, consultants, and environmental professionals around the country. He also filmed a commercial videotape training series on groundwater data analysis. More recently. Dr. Cameron developed a no-cost, publicly-available, geostatistical and statistical-based software tool (GTS v1.0) for the US Air Force and DoD to optimize sampling frequencies and locations at sites undergoing long-term ground-water monitoring (LTM).

Important: 

• Please bring a pen or pencil and notepad
• Drinks and snacks will be provided throughout the day
• Please wait to receive a course confirmation email (roughly one month prior to the class) before making any travel arrangements