ASTM D6312-17

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 typically 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, 1 %), the possibility of failing at least one test on any monitoring event is virtually guaranteed. This assumes you have performed the statistics correctly in the first place.