Establishing sensitivity requirements for environmental analyses from project data quality objectives

This article proposes a simple strategy for establishing sensitivity requirements (quantitation limits) for environmental chemical analyses when the primary data quality objective is to determine if a contaminant of concern is greater or less than an action level (e.g., an environmental "cleanup goal," regulatory limit, or risk-based decision limit). The approach assumes that the contaminant concentrations are normally distributed with constant variance (i.e., the variance is not significantly dependent upon concentration near the action level). When the total or "field" portion of the measurement uncertainty can be estimated, the relative uncertainty at the laboratory's quantitation limit can be used to determine requirements for analytical sensitivity. If only the laboratory component of the total uncertainty is known, the approach can be used to identify analytical methods or laboratories that will not satisfy objectives for sensitivity (e.g., when selecting methodology during project planning).