Avast ye technicians!
So our stream discharge measurements started out pretty rough - the intense rains overnight made one site doable, but the other had way to high water and velocity for us to feel safe doing a discharge measurement. My morale was pretty low until I conferred with our NCSU Extension guy who reassured me that getting only a few measurements would be sufficient to program the autosamplers.
Fortunately the rain slowed down through the day, and we eventually got our "river-legs", so to speak. Even with our high-tech waders it's still a challenge to stand in high velocity water where the streambed is made of large riprap. The rocks are much more unstable than what you'd find in a natural stream, and there's few spaces available with fine materials that accommodate your feet better, just more large rocks and cracks below the top layer. But we got about 4 good measurements at each site over a nice discharge range. More tomorrow if it rains overnight.
I must say I LOVE our doppler velocity meter, if nothing else because it does all the logging for you and you don't have to write anything down (which is an even greater pain in the neck in the rain). OTOH, it is a very sweet piece of technology. Never needs calibration, no moving parts to jam up with fine debris, does extensive quality control logging (compares velocities, flow directions, depths, and signal-to-noise ratio between points and flags outliers for you, asking if you want to do that measurement again). And DOPPLER, dude. Doppler.
Fortunately the rain slowed down through the day, and we eventually got our "river-legs", so to speak. Even with our high-tech waders it's still a challenge to stand in high velocity water where the streambed is made of large riprap. The rocks are much more unstable than what you'd find in a natural stream, and there's few spaces available with fine materials that accommodate your feet better, just more large rocks and cracks below the top layer. But we got about 4 good measurements at each site over a nice discharge range. More tomorrow if it rains overnight.
I must say I LOVE our doppler velocity meter, if nothing else because it does all the logging for you and you don't have to write anything down (which is an even greater pain in the neck in the rain). OTOH, it is a very sweet piece of technology. Never needs calibration, no moving parts to jam up with fine debris, does extensive quality control logging (compares velocities, flow directions, depths, and signal-to-noise ratio between points and flags outliers for you, asking if you want to do that measurement again). And DOPPLER, dude. Doppler.