Hi I'm Molly Schreiner,
I am a hydrologic technician with the USGS
at the New Jersey Water Science Center.
I started here in 2012 as a student intern.
Today I focus on water quality sampling
and analysis. Hydrologic technicians
for the USGS usually specialize in one
of three major disciplines, surface water,
groundwater and water quality sampling.
This video shows me and a few of my
colleagues in Nevada and New Jersey
performing some water quality sampling.
Our hydrologic technician, Jonathan Cohl,
is using this DH-81 sampler to collect
our equal width increment sample.
We are here at Delaware at Trenton.
For the national Water quality
network sample, we're here about once
or twice a month, super low stage,
so we're wading about half of it today.
Now let's move to move to Nevada to
see the DH-81 sampler in action underwater,
where the great things about USGS that
we have a standard operating procedure
across the nation, which is great
for large scale analysis of water data.
Hello my name is Ron Kauble and I'm a
hydrologic technician at the USGS Nevada
Water Science Center in Carson City, NV.
I've been with the USGS since 2012,
as Molly mentioned in the previous clip,
we often use the DH-81 sampler to
collect the water quality sample.
Today, Bryce and I are sampling for
the national Water Quality network
on the Truckee River at Tracy,
which is about 15 miles downstream of Reno,
NV. We are using a DH-81 sampler
with a 5 sixteenths nozzle attached.
Under low flow conditions and
even though we have low flow,
a good portion of the channel
has moderate velocity.
Therefore we attach a nozzle to keep
the water entering the sampler at
the same velocity as the stream.
This helps ensure we capture
representative sample of water in
the profile while using the DH-81.
This video demonstrates how the
sampler vents
the air while collecting the
sample at one of 10 equally spaced
points along the transect.
After the sample is collected at
the point it is emptied into the churn.
The churn is used to collect all 10 points
and composite them into one sample.
Bryce and I practice a clean hands dirty
hands method of emptying the DH-81.
I being The dirty hands collect
the sample and hold the sampler
Bryce with clean hands.
Open the churn and empties the DH
81 towards the end of the bottle
being emptied you see Bryce.
He gives it a swirl to get any solid
material stuck in the bottle out.
Bryce changes his gloves,
often in the clean hands role doing his
best to avoid contamination of the sample.
My name's Bryce Redinger with
Nevada Water Science Center
And here's the churn that our samples
we just collected are going to go into.
Here are the bottles that we
will split that water into.
We have unfiltered here.
And then we will filter them into these.
These are labeled so the lab
knows what kind of processing
to do on each of these bottles.
Here we've got a pesticide sample.
Here are some acids that we add to each
of the samples depending on what they are.
You just take really good notes.
Here's a timelapse of us sampling
collecting raw samples from the churn.
Then setting up my TPCN, which is
total particulate carbon and nitrogen.
We run the raw sample through a filter,
collect particulate,
and then the lab analyzes the filter.
We do three of these just for consistency.
See, I changed my gloves a lot.
Clean hands are super important.
I am now sampling inside the chamber bag.
To keep any dust in the other
particulates out of the sample,
I'll run some deionized water
through my filter here to prime it,
and now I'm collecting my sample from
the water we collected in the river.
Wipe them down, keep them nice and clean.
Doing these glass bottles.
These are just a different type of sample.
No air bubbles can be in these guys.
Nice and clean. And I'm doing a pesticide
sample now. Wipe everything down.
Clean everything up, put it in a bag.
Before we head back to the office,
I'd like to show you a little
bit of groundwater sampling.
The sampling uses a pump rather
than a bottle and churn like you saw in
our last surface water collection video
Here's some more water quality sampling.
This time we're sampling groundwater.
The well water is pumped through tubing
a manifold and into our sampling chamber,
where each of the vials is
filled with sample water.
A few drops of hydrochloric acid are
added as preservative for the sample.
These vials will get analyzed
for volatile organic compounds,
so after the sampling is complete,
they'll get packed on ice and shipped to our
national water quality lab in Denver, Co.
This lab performs most of
our water quality analyses.
And process as much as we can
from our mobile lab in the field.
Right now we're going to head
back to our office lab and perform our
alkalinity titration and wrap up any
loose ends before our sample's ready
to ship off for analysis.
Hi Ron Kauble again back in the office
we process and alkalinity on a filtered
sample we collected earlier today.
Alkalinity measures the ability of a
water sample to neutralize strong acid.
As seen in the time lapse video,
I am adding a known quantity of
sulfuric acid to a known quantity
of sample in order to determine
the maximum rate of change in
pH per volume of a titrant added,
also known as the inflection point method.
We are just about wrapped up
with our water quality sampling.
The next task is getting our
samples to the lab for analysis.
Here's a timelapse of the shipping process.
The goal is to ship out
samples quickly and securely.
Each bottle and its respective
paperwork is checked for accuracy
of identifying information.
Caps are secure and fragile bottles
are appropriately cushioned.
They are then tucked in ice, bagged,
taped up and on their way to the lab.
Thanks for joining me and the
other hydrotechs for a day of
water quality sampling for USGS.