This guidance document is designed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Region 9 Quality Assurance Office to provide assistance to project officers, Superfund contractors, and Superfund grantees in performing timely data evaluation and/or validation of laboratory data. Data review is considered a necessary step to ensuring that data are of sufficient quality to support decisions based on data quality objectives (DQOs) as defined in the appropriate project or site specific Quality Assurance Project Plan (QAPjP) or Sampling and Analysis Plan (SAP). The evaluation process which is described allows several tiers that require an increasingly more stringent review of the data. The appropriate tier can be chosen based on the data’s intended use. The guidance defines Region 9 policy and provides examples of the various evaluation tiers as they might be applied to different types of Superfund projects.

• Region 9 Superfund Data Evaluation/Validation Guide (PDF)(13 pp, 74 K, Draft: December 2001)
  Assistance to project officers, Superfund contractors, and grantees for timely data evaluation and/or validation of laboratory data.