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Re: Confusion Regarding "Surrogate Standard"

Posted: Fri May 01, 2015 7:38 pm
by Steve Reimer
James, that is still being debated among the program people. Thus the definition of LLOQ in SW-846, minimum level in Drinking Water and another attempt at MDL for Wastewater.
Wednesday I was in a meeting with EPA and state people and the term surrogate was used both ways in the same discussion, depending on whether they were chemists or microbiologists.
CLP still uses "system monitoring compounds".

As far as how little you can reliably see in a sample, good luck with that.
The closest I would get to that would be to spike every sample at the reporting limit. Certainly not practical for current technology unless your number of samples is very limited.

Re: Confusion Regarding "Surrogate Standard"

Posted: Tue May 19, 2015 6:43 pm
by James_Ball
Steve Reimer wrote:
James, that is still being debated among the program people. Thus the definition of LLOQ in SW-846, minimum level in Drinking Water and another attempt at MDL for Wastewater.
Wednesday I was in a meeting with EPA and state people and the term surrogate was used both ways in the same discussion, depending on whether they were chemists or microbiologists.
CLP still uses "system monitoring compounds".

As far as how little you can reliably see in a sample, good luck with that.
The closest I would get to that would be to spike every sample at the reporting limit. Certainly not practical for current technology unless your number of samples is very limited.


I am not a big fan of most of what the government does concerning our profession, but I do wish here that they would make one single rule that defined what term to use and how it is determined and force it to be used across all division of government agencies.

Re: Confusion Regarding "Surrogate Standard"

Posted: Tue May 19, 2015 9:27 pm
by Steve Reimer
Some of the terms used in documents and rules are not well defined within the documents themselves.
Often it is because the terms were in wide use when the first version was written and everybody knew what it meant, except that by not stating the definition they didn't realize that their definition wasn't universal. Move forward 30 or so years and now it is entrenched and still confusing on revision 5.