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Ref. No. [UMCES] CBL 2016-013
ACT VS16-04
52
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 6 – 8.
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 6.
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