MEFW Sessions 14 and 15

Introduction

Now we begin the laborious process of data harvest and analysis. But it's also a lot of fun, seriously. Session 14 was about maps and data recovery and the water cycle. Session 15...

Session 14 Summary

Session 14 began with map work: Where do South Boulder Creek and Boulder Creek come from, where do they join, where do they go? We then discussed the water cycle using the circuit analogy with the sun as the energy source. The circuit / cycle closes on itself with evaporation / condensation / precipitation. Jack has this stuff down like nobody's business.

Our discussion continued on to mixing and conservation of water on planet earth. RF suggested (without proof) that some of the water we drink today might have been somewhere in the ocean or in Asia three months ago.

To finish of Session 14 we unpacked our iButton thermochrons and wiped the silicon glue off (messy!). We then downloaded the data into a computer and looked at the preliminary plots using the OneWire interface application. Lastly we looked at some photos of the South Boulder Creek field site using a photo viewer application called Photosynth.

We're still learning how to format plots using Excel. So to standardize the x-axis for now we just plot everything in minutes starting on February 29, 2008 at midnight. In the plot below, 4320 is the first minute of March 3, 2008. Each vertical line is a successive day. Vertical axis is temperature in degrees Fahrenheit. These are air temperatures (not creek water) for three sensors: One was three feet off the ground (red), the other two were on the ground resting at the bases of two trees. When the red plot "flatlines" it means that it got colder than the thermochron was able to record. Sitting three feet off the ground in a crevice of a fallen tree trunk apparently exposes the sensor to colder temperatures.

Session 15

Sheila Murphy from USGS spent an hour with us talking about streams, watersheds, energy, and biota. Some sketch notes, will be incorporated into the curriculum later:

• Water takes a long time for the sun to heat,
• Consider living inland versus living next to an ocean
• Ground has water, same Cv argument concerning heat retention; this gets to the "stump" temp sensor
• Vegetation cover by stream: shade: temp down: temp also stable: impact on biota
• tamarisk: example of invasive species that pulls water out of the system
• algae need: sun, oxygen; also affected by nutrients and water temp
• add fertilizer: algae bloom: nite time: starve oxygen out of the stream: that's what causes a fish kill
• EC is of considerable value

Things We Need To Do

RF

• DONE: Create initial version: Analysis worksheets for the students
• Put worksheets on the web site as pdf.
• Build out the SM VE map control to include photos from this project
• Worksheet 2: Analysis to base flow paradox (hydrograph)
• Worksheet 3: Latitude and miles
  • Copy out Lat/Lons from Garmin
• Revisit and close out spectra and stellar fingerprints

Students

• Worksheets
• Annotate data
• Fill in maps

observation/analysis