A New Methodology to Reduce Cost of Groundwater Monitoring Programs

At contaminated sites, lengthy environmental clean-ups often involve a long-term program that can be costly. Responsible parties, through their consultants, should consider Cost-Effective Sampling (CES) methods that, in addition to their professional judgment, will tailor the monitoring program to directly support the cleanup and closure of the contaminated site. The goal should be to collect only those data needed to make operational and closure decisions. A successful optimization of a monitoring program should take into consideration the sampling frequency, analytic methods (temporal domain), and the sampling locations (spatial domain). To achieve such optimization, Ramboll Environ developed a methodology combining the concept of Regional Vector (RV) and multidimensional analyses such as Principal component Analyses, Factorial Discriminant Analyses, Correspondences Analyses and Dynamic Clouds Analysis.

These methods are hypothesis-free, and therefore, unbiased. They can be used to analyze multivariate data such as ground water level fluctuations and water chemistry simultaneously, collected over several sampling events in several wells. The purpose of the analyses is to evaluate and group wells based on the similarity in their temporal and spatial behavior. The methodology does not provide a "push button" solution, but requires the thoughtful and informed application of the various mathematical tools to provide output that can be used to meet the project requirements.