EESB04 Discharge Measurement.

There is no fieldwork requirement for the Principles of Hydrology course, but our professor decided to take the class down to the valley during the last lecture. The goal was to gather streamflow data with a current-meter, and use them to calculate the discharge rate by using velocity-area method.

Tom, one of the technicians of the department, 

and Professor Mitchell, whom I had EESA01 and EESB04 with.

U.S. Geological Survey website gives a good explanation and a diagram on how the streamflow is measured: http://ga.water.usgs.gov/edu/streamflow2.html The same method of cross-sectional discharge measurement has been applied to measure the velocity of the streamflow of Highland Creek. The calculation based on measurement has given us the value of 0.48 cubic meters per second, compared to the 0.39 cubic meters per second, the data from the Water Survey of Canada:

I wonder if there is another field like Geoscience- very fundamental in academic nature (what could be other than studying mother Earth?) and yet so practical and activity based. People in this field are the one that can truly take the benefits of spending their time in a lab/office and also get paid to do these extraordinary activities in the field. I wonder if this is something I've thought about when I was young.