science at work updates
We just did our first monthly stream water sampling last Friday, and I'm downloading and QA'ing all the data today: flowmeter, water quality meter, temperature sensors, water level sensors, rain gauge. Later today I'm meeting with the NC State Extension guy who's been helping me learn how to set up and troubleshoot the autosamplers. It's taken 6 months of troubleshooting, sadly, but I think we're finally starting to get fairly clean data. One of the autosamplers is behaving weirdly still, so hopefully he can help me iron that out.
So I've been going over our rain gauge data, water level data, and flowmeter data in order to look at a few storm events to see how fast the water comes up, how high is the peak, how long does the flow tail off, when does this happen relative to the rain. It'd be nice if I could do a simple integration and get the volume of streamflow in a storm, but these aren't simple curves, so I'll have to do them "by hand" using hour-long blocks or something.
Ostensibly, we're doing these studies to see if we can reduce the "flashy" hydrograph of our two project streams. "Flashy" means the water level comes up very fast and goes down fast after a rainfall, in comparison to the natural condition which tends to have a much slower rise and fall, and also a lower peak. Sometimes we have fast rises, but other times it's several increasing peaks. That might be because of the rainfall pattern. The archetypical skewed bellcurve shape is based on a very simple storm that has a set intensity throughout. The curves do tail off rather slowly, which at least tells me some rainfall is getting stored somwhere in the watersheds, but it's not really slowing down the initial runoff. We shall see...
So I've been going over our rain gauge data, water level data, and flowmeter data in order to look at a few storm events to see how fast the water comes up, how high is the peak, how long does the flow tail off, when does this happen relative to the rain. It'd be nice if I could do a simple integration and get the volume of streamflow in a storm, but these aren't simple curves, so I'll have to do them "by hand" using hour-long blocks or something.
Ostensibly, we're doing these studies to see if we can reduce the "flashy" hydrograph of our two project streams. "Flashy" means the water level comes up very fast and goes down fast after a rainfall, in comparison to the natural condition which tends to have a much slower rise and fall, and also a lower peak. Sometimes we have fast rises, but other times it's several increasing peaks. That might be because of the rainfall pattern. The archetypical skewed bellcurve shape is based on a very simple storm that has a set intensity throughout. The curves do tail off rather slowly, which at least tells me some rainfall is getting stored somwhere in the watersheds, but it's not really slowing down the initial runoff. We shall see...