title: Soil sampling strategies for site assessments in petroleum-contaminated areas.
abstract: Environmental site assessments are frequently executed for monitoring and remediation performance evaluation purposes, especially in total petroleum hydrocarbon (TPH)-contaminated areas, such as gas stations. As a key issue, reproducibility of the assessment results must be ensured, especially if attempts are made to compare results between different institutions. Although it is widely known that uncertainties associated with soil sampling are much higher than those with chemical analyses, field guides or protocols to deal with these uncertainties are not stipulated in detail in the relevant regulations, causing serious errors and distortion of the reliability of environmental site assessments. In this research, uncertainties associated with soil sampling and sample reduction for chemical analysis were quantified using laboratory-scale experiments and the theory of sampling. The research results showed that the TPH mass assessed by sampling tends to be overestimated and sampling errors are high, especially for the low range of TPH concentrations. Homogenization of soil was found to be an efficient method to suppress uncertainty, but high-resolution sampling could be an essential way to minimize this.
authors.affiliation: Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Hannam University, Daejeon, Republic of Korea. kimgh@hnu.kr.
authors.forename: Geonha
authors.identifier: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8535-0688
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Kim
authors.affiliation: SAFE Research Center, Hannam University, Daejeon, Republic of Korea.
authors.forename: Saikat
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Chowdhury
authors.affiliation: Taiwan Environmental Scientific Co. Ltd., Kaohsiung City, Taiwan.
authors.forename: Yen-Min
authors.initials: YM
authors.lastname: Lin
authors.affiliation: Department of Environmental Engineering, National Chung-Hsing University, Taichung City, Taiwan.
authors.forename: Chih-Jen
authors.initials: CJ
authors.lastname: Lu
mesh_terms: D004784:Environmental Monitoring / Q000379:methods* / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D004787:Environmental Pollution / Q000032:analysis*; D010578:Petroleum; D012987:Soil / Q000737:chemistry; D012989:Soil Pollutants / Q000032:analysis; D035501:Uncertainty
chemical_list: D010578:Petroleum; D012987:Soil; D012989:Soil Pollutants
keywords: Sampling error; Sampling protocol; Site assessment; Theory of sampling; Uncertainty