Abstract
Federal regulations require that state and local air monitoring agencies perform special checks to assess the precision and accuracy of their measurement systems and report the results to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) each calendar quarter. The assessments are maintained in a computer file along with the routine air monitoring data reported separately to EPA's National Aerometric Data Bank. The data quality assessments and air monitoring data are made available to various users on request.
In a separate program, the National Performance Audit Program, standard samples are mailed as blind samples to the state and local agencies for analysis. The results are reported to EPA for evaluation.
Evaluation of the results of the precision and accuracy assessments is performed, and a comparison of these assessments with the results of the National Performance Audit Program is made. This paper reports the results of this comparison.
