20 Assignment 3 - Streamflow
20.1 ๐ instructions
This is where learning happens, not during a lecture. Youโll learn a ton of things by doing them yourself. Much success! ๐
Create a Jupyter Notebook called assignment-03-IDNUMBER, where IDNUMBER is your 9-digit ID. This is the file only file we will check.
20.2 ๐ locations and data
Choose one location in the US.
Import streamflow data from USGSโs National Water Information System. Choose on the map any measuring station you see fit. Make sure there is available discharge data (usually given in cubic feet per second) in small time intervals, e.g., every 15 minutes.
Go to NOAAโs Climate Reference Network Data website. The sub-hourly (5-min) data contains information on many variables, we are interested in precipitation.
Attention! Some os the USGS stations provide precipitation data. If you find one such station, step 2 above is unnecessary. If you only find discharge data in the USGS website, then make sure you choose two stations in very close proximity (USGS and NOAA). Because there are only a few high-resolution NOAA stations, you might want to start from there and then find discharge data for a stream near the NOAA station.
Bottom line: you are looking for precipitation and stream discharge data, for stations in close proximity, with a high temporal resolution (5 min, 15 min, etc).
20.3 ๐ tasks
Choose a rain event of a few hours in your data set. Find the rate of effective water input (p) and the event flow rate (q). Analyze the data in a similar was as done during class (various graphs explaining what you see). Find also the characteristic times of the event (centroid lag \(T_{LC}\), and centroid lag-to-peak \(T_{LPC}\)).
Try to find information on the climate, geography, soil, and land use of the watershed. Begin the assignment by explaining about the watershed you chose and characterizing it. When presenting the data and your analyses, discuss what you see based on the concepts learned in class (infiltration, runoff generation, and the factors that affect them). Does the information you found match what you see? What makes sense, and what doesnโt?
Discussion is important!
You will have two weeks to deliver your assignment. You should not hand in a dry document with only figures and code, Iโm expecting text before and after each code/graph cell, explaining what you did, why you did it, and how it fits the story you are telling. Donโt forget to put labels on your plot axes, title, legend, etc.
Your Jupyter Notebook should be fully functional: if we press Kernel > Restart & Run All, all the code must work without any errors.
20.4 ๐ importing the data
You can use the code from previous assignments and from the exercise lectures.