Stream Flow Project
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Hypothesis: I believe that the water will increase due to the discharge at transects B and D, but will lose water in between transects B and C, but not enough to make the river loss more than it gains.
The excel spreadsheet gave me the distance from the shore, depth, and the average velocity. I used mathematical formulas on excel to figure out my answers. I thought that the water would increase at transects B and D because there is a larger amount of water being added to the stream and not enough water would be taken out through irrigation or the ground absorbing the water. I was also able to see the loss of water in between transects B and D, to see how much water was being taken out of the stream. To get the section width on the excel sheet I subtracted the first point by the proceeding point after it and so on and forth. These results were needed because without them I could not see where the velocity increased at in the river and without the velocity readings I would not be able to give an accurate reading of the discharge of the river. The next step was to figure out the section area of the river. Multiplying the depth times the section width tells us the section area. This is needed so that we can multiply the section area by the average velocity to get the discharge of the river. The section area tells the amount of cubic feet between the data points. The velocity states how fast the water is moving in feet per seconds. When multiplied the discharge is computed, then added up to get the sum of all the data point discharged measurements. This tells us how much water is passing the transect points. The instructions state to follow this procedure through points A, B, C, and D. This information is used to show what the water is doing and wear it is going. The tributary B increased the discharge flow by around one hundred cubic feet per second. The 1700 feet that the water travels between transect B and C, over 20 cubic feet per second of water is loss, due to irrigation, evaporation, or through the ground absorbing it. Tributary number two that flows into transect D increases the discharge by over one hundred cubic feet per second. This shows that this stream is gaining more water than it is losing because of the tributaries adding more water than can be lost through irrigation, evaporation, or through ground absorption.