On Monday, March 21 we visited our Curtis Creek study site and surveyed the site.  The field data collected was intended to fulfill the topographic and flow boundary conditions we need for the hydraulic model, as well as help specify appropriate parameters, provide validation data and provide contextual information. The photos in the album at right may also prove as invaluable reminders when you're building your topographic surfaces, computational meshes and verifying model performance.

Topographic Data

We used a Leica 1203+ total station and a Leica System 1200 Base and Rover to collect topographic data at the site. Roughly 1200 GPS points and 430 total station points were collected. A topogaphically stratified sampling strategy was adopted whereby higher point density was sought in areas of greater topographic complexity and hydraulic interest. Points were attributed descriptively and breaklines such as top of banks (TOB) toes of banks (TOE), grade breaks and waters edge were all recorded as 3D polylines.

If you want to work with the raw *.csv files of Total Station and GPS data and/or those that have been manually seperated into TOPO data, control data and velocity points, download this 2011_GPS&TS Surveys.zip file.  If you just want to load these files into ArcGIS and get going, unpack this GPS & Total Station Survyes.lpk   layer package file and you will find everything you need to build the DEM, water surface DEM and derive water depth from.

You can unpack a layer package into the table of contents of your ArcMap document by simply locating it in your ArcCatalog Window and right clicking on it and selecting Unpack.

Aerial Imagery

In September of 2010, Aggie Air flew drone imagery of the site for us.

For a KMZ of to view in Google Earth of the above imagery click here. To download the images as a layer package file (*.lpk) for use in ArcGIS, click here.

You can unpack a layer package into the table of contents of your ArcMap document by simply locating it in your ArcCatalog Window and right clicking on it and selecting Unpack.

Other Attributes Influencing Flow

All of the 'other attributes' can be downloaded as a *.lpk Layer Package file  here .

You can unpack a layer package into the table of contents of your ArcMap document by simply locating it in your ArcCatalog Window and right clicking on it and selecting Unpack.

These include fascies mapping, location of hydrualic jumps, location of backwaters and/or eddies, and locations of undercut banks:

Grain Size Distributions for Fascies

Flow Data

Velocity measurements at Upstream and Downstream Locations:

Velocity measurements at points:

The velocity measurements and water depths were taken at specific locations (surveyed with rtkGPS) using a Marsh McBirney electromagnetic flow meter at 0.6 the depth. I appended this data to the GPS data so you can import the CSV directly into ArcGIS with the depth and velocity measurements as attributes.

From Noah Scmadel & Beth Nielson at our XS-1 (their PT515).

Noah provided us with a rating curve for the pressure transducer at the downstream cross section (XS-1).

Rating curves were then developed using the stage-discharge observations in the form:
where Q is the predicted stream discharge (cfs), a and b are the regression parameters, and Z is the stage measured by the pressure transducer (ft). Using the discharge and stage data acquired at each station, nonlinear regression was used to estimate the parameters a and b.

For the PT515 rating curve, the parameters a and b were estimated to be 44.29 and 1.99, respectively. REMEMBER this is in feet and CFS, and we're working in meters and Cumecs!

From our survey, the bottom of the pressure transducer is estimated at an elevation of 1707.993 m.