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Ref. No. [UMCES] CBL 2016-015

ACT VS16-06

53

QUALITY ASSURANCE AND QUALITY CONTROL

All technical activities conducted by ACT comply with ACT’s Quality Management

System (QMS), which includes the policies, objectives, procedures, authority, and accountability

needed to ensure quality in ACT’s work processes, products, and services. The QMS provides the

framework for quality assurance (QA) functions, which cover planning, implementation, and

review of data collection activities and the use of data in decision making, and quality control. The

QMS also ensures that all ACT data collection and processing activities are carried out in a

consistent manner, to produce data of known and documented quality that can be used with a high

degree of certainty by the intended user to support specific decisions or actions regarding

technology performance. ACT’s QMS meets the requirements of ISO/IEC 17025:2005(E),

General

requirements for the competence of testing and calibration laboratories

; the American National

Standards Institute (ANSI)/American Society for Quality (ASQ) E4-2004

Quality Systems for

Environmental Data and Technology Programs

; and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency,

quality standards for environmental data collection, production, and use. An effective assessment

program is an integral part of ACT’s quality system. The ACT Quality Assurance (QA) Manager

independently conducted two Technical Systems Audits (TSA) and data quality assessments of the

reference sample data for the DO verification.

Quality Control Samples

Each site conducted weekly field duplicates which are presented below in Tables 7 – 9.

The global average of the standard deviation among field duplicates for all field test sites was 0.03

±0.07 (n=27), with 11 values exceeding our expected quality threshold of better than 0.013 mg/L

DO. The average of the standard deviation among MTU field duplicates was .011 ±.014 (n=12),

the average for CBL was .074 ±.006 (n=9) and the average for HIMB was .011 ±.012 (n=6). The

higher variability at CBL likely reflected fine-scale heterogeneity in the water mass as was also

noted by the greater variation in temperature across the mooring rack. In general, results attest to

the representativeness of our sampling to water mass being analyzed by the test instruments and to

consistent sample handling.

Table 7.

Results of Field Duplicates (FD) for the Keweenaw Waterway, MI mooring test.

Date/Time

Rep

Temp

Spec

Cond

DO

Std

Dev

Mean

Std

Dev

ABS

Diff

1-14-15 10:30 FD1

.06

94

13.819

.005

13.819

0.00

0.000

FD2

13.819

.002

1-22-15 12:30 FD1

.31

99

12.981

.013

12.986

.007

.010

FD2

12.991

.005

1-29-15 16:00 FD1

.24

103

12.958

.041

12.947

.015

.021

FD2

12.937

.013

2-5-15 15:30

FD1

.21

106

12.671

.004

12.667

.006

.009

FD2

12.662

.007