Field methods in hydrology offers hands-on education for Biological Systems Engineering students

This is Biological Systems Engineering Field Methods in Hydrology. We spend a lot of time throughout the semester going around to different sites and measuring water and water quality. So really getting into how do you measure water in rivers and streams and what's the stuff in that stream? Is it nutrients and sediment? We're out here today at the New River trying to measure how much water is flowing by here when you have really deep water. You know, some things we can go in and wade and, you know, make measurements that way, but here if it's too deep to measure, we have to go out in a boat and then we use our instrument to measure depths and the water velocity, and if we integrate that together, we can determine what's that kind of cross-sectional area and then how fast is that water moving through there to get this volume flow rate. We're using a velocity and depth probe. Essentially, it uses Doppler radar, and it's actually sending out waves into the water and then it's collecting velocity based on particulates that are moving through and it's also collecting depth just by bouncing off the bottom. We still need to measure our streams and rivers and kind of track our you know water quantity and water quality going forth both for human drinking water, irrigation purposes, understanding flood control but then also for the ecosystem as a whole there's a lot of unique species and endangered species in the new river watershed. And you see so many issues with flooding, see so many issues with drinking water and you've got to have people out here studying our river systems, studying our water systems to sort of get to the root cause of them and then try to get solutions. A lot of our students will go out and work in stream restoration or some type of maybe land development where you're understanding how water is moving across the landscape or into streams and predicting flooding but it's really important to understand how those data are collected and what are some of the uncertainties when you start really thinking about the real world.