EMMA

Environmental Monitoring

and

Measurement Advisor

EMMA is an expert system (interactive software) for project managers, administrators, and others who use or procure laboratory services for environmental analyses. It is used to plan improved and cost-effective environmental monitoring projects. It is also a highly effective teaching aid for instructors and students and was funded in part by the National Science Foundation (NSF). EMMA's new innovative technology leads you through complex decisions to tailor your plans to meet specific project needs by considering the physical and chemical characteristics of the sampling site and target analytes, desired data quality, available budget, your objectives, and the consequences of making wrong decisions based on the data you will obtain.

To do this EMMA combines decision criteria based on systematic planning (including all elements of EPA’s Data Quality Objective (DQO) process), your specific project needs, and methods information from the new National Environmental Methods Index (NEMI). It also incorporates the latest information from EPA's new Triad Approach and EPA's new Performance and Acceptance Criteria (PAC) Process.

EMMA consists of three modules, each based on a group of interactive decision criteria. It helps you to consider, and answer, all critical questions for project planning so that you will have a plan that guarantees that you will get the right data on time the first time with no unpleasant surprises at the end.

• The first module incorporates decisions based on what, where, when, why, and how you plan to monitor a site (including your QA/QC requirements and budget).

• The second module (Method Selection) is freely available on the NEMI web site so that it can be used with NEMI and people can become familiar with the expert system and how it works.

• The third module calculates how many samples you'll need for your project requirements and matches that to your available budget and desired confidence levels in the data.

EMMA includes a tutorial, and a manual with a workbook. The workbook contains convenient forms for calculations of numbers of samples in relation to your budget and project objectives. EMMA is now free, courtesy of Instant Reference Sources, Inc.