There are several ways of quantifying the error of the standard deviation in the normal case. I am going to present the profile likelihood of σ which can be used for approximating confidence intervals.
Let x=(x1,...,xn) be a sample from a Normal(μ,σ). The corresponding likelihood function is given by
L(μ,σ)∝1σnexp(−12σ2∑j=1n(xj−μ)2)
Then, the Maximum Likelihood Estimators are given by (μ^,σ^)=(x¯,s), where s=1n∑nj=1(xj−x¯)2−−−−−−−−−−−−−−√. Given that you are interested on quantifying the error on σ, you can then calculate the normalised profile likelihood of this parameter as follows.
Rp(σ)=supμL(μ,σ)L(μ^,σ^)=(σ^σ)nexp[n2(1−(σ^σ)2)]
Note that Rp:R+→(0,1]. An interval of level 0.147 has an approximate confidence of 0.95. Next I attach an R code that can be used for calculating these intervals. You can modify it accordingly in your context (or if you post the data I can include these changes).
data = rnorm(30)
n = length(data)
sg = sqrt(mean((data-mean(data))^2))
# Profile likelihood
rp = function(sigma) return( (sg/sigma)^n*exp(0.5*n*(1-(sg/sigma)^2)) )
vec = rvec = seq(0.5,1.5,0.01)
for(i in 1:length(rvec)) rvec[i] = rp(vec[i])
plot(vec,rvec,type="l")
rpc = function(sigma) return(rp(sigma)-0.147)
# Approximate 95% confidence interval
c(uniroot(rpc,c(0.7,0.8))$root,uniroot(rpc,c(1.1,1.3))$root)
An advantage of this sort of intervals is that they are invariant under transformations. In this case if you calculate an interval for σ, I=(L,U), then the corresponding interval for σ2 is simply I′=(L2,U2).