TM95-02 Separate Analytical Services Request Form Suggested for Trace Element ppb Protocol

Recently, the Water Resources Division has instituted new procedures for sampling and treating water for ppb trace metal determinations. The procedures are designed to minimize contamination and filtering variables. The ppb trace metal samples arrive at the National Water Quality Laboratory (NWQL) in "FA" (Filtered, Acidified) bottles and may be accompanied by other "FA" bottles for the same sample that were collected for other determinations. Unfortunately, there is no way to designate the different FA bottles on the standard NWQL Analytical Services Request (ASR). Many collectors have written comments on the bottle and expected that the NWQL would correctly interpret these notes and perform the correct analysis on the appropriate bottle. However, the NWQL is structured to work from the ASR and cannot interpret comments written on bottles that may be obscured by applied labels or become illegible. The NWQL recognizes the large amount of effort that our dedicated samplers are putting into these trace metal samples and wants to have a foolproof way of analyzing the correct bottle for the correct constituents. Therefore, NWQL suggests that in all cases where specially treated "FA" bottles are to be analyzed for trace metals and where there are any other "FA" bottles submitted for that sample, 
the following action be taken: Special "FA" bottles should be submitted on a separate ASR with the 
time of collection offset from the rest of that sample by 1 minute. NWQL recommends that this practice start immediately. NWQL also recognizes that this is additional paperwork required of the field sampling crew, and we apologize for that. We hope that the crews recognize our desire to help them achieve the highest data quality possible. NWIS-II will provide a more elegant solution.