Reconnaissance

Monday morning.  5:15am.  Cool.  Sleepy.  I go through the motions of my daily waking ritual, only now an hour earlier.  I take up my travel gear, kiss the sleeping ones, and hit the road.  Coffee, black, two creams, loathsome from McDonalds but open and cheap.  I pull into the office at 5:50, unload and re-load into Mike's. We're on the road by ten after six.

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The trip is shy of four hours.  We drive in early morning bleariness.  Traffic is dead.  I may as well be.  We hit a rest stop halfway to our destination.  Temperature's dropped.  I see my breath in the air.  The road rumbles on as we roll west, away from my family, my home, and everybody I love.  It is the first time I've left my daughter for this long, and I miss her already.  But there's work to be had.  We're explorers bound for a brave new world, or at least a different world than home.  The Arch appears in the smoggy distance.  East St. Louis, we have arrived.

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I am no stranger to urban life.  For five years I lived in Louisville, a relative metropolitan with a population in the millions.  I had a few different residencies, one being in a house dubbed the Old Skank.  The heat barely worked.  Water was so hard that it was almost white coming out of the faucet.  The cabinets were tilted and doors would close/open as per gravity's whims.  To get in the tub you had to step over a two-foot wall.  My car was broken into here.  An attempted rape was stopped on the front porch just houses away.  Yes, I know the seedy parts of the city, but all of this had nothing on our corner of heaven in East St. Louis.  Windows and doors were barred; scores of houses were condemned; everything was in disrepair.  But we weren't house hunting; no, we were looking at drainage structures, trying to see how the water was flowing in and around the intersection for our new project.

The stretch of road isn't very far, just a simple interchange with a bridge.  There were around 30 culverts to inspect.  To do this, we found these structures on our maps, then took pictures of them.  If anything of special interest caught our eyes, we'd jot notes down, though this usually consisted of whether or not an inlet was grated and/or clogged.  Occasionally we'd find some crazy outlet conditions, and one culvert took us several hundred feet into a mysterious woods filled with eroded banks and lethal briars.  Ah, but it was nice to be outside, and Monday proved warm enough to need only short sleeves.

We worked hard, and by six o'clock, we were both tired.  The hotel called; supper beckoned; sleep scratched.  We relented.  I brought my computer, aiming to get in some good writing time.  I brought some books, eager to read.  Alas, I was too sleepy.  By ten-thirty I was out, missing Avonlea, missing Keisha, missing Kentucky.

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I had a nightmare, for the first time in ages.  I woke up at 4:40 with goosebumps.  Someone was standing over me.  I dreamed of demons, but I know not why.

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6:30am.  41 degrees.  Raining.  I'd slept with the air conditioner on, so my room was icy.  I hurried and dressed, packed, and headed down to see how awesome the breakfast would be.  There was a waffle maker, so it was at least palatable.  We ate breakfast and went over the plans while reruns of Charmed played across the screens above.  There were a few more culverts to inspect, and since it had been storming, we'd look for some of the pipes we couldn't locate the previous day.

We worked through the rain, and by lunch my feet were thoroughly soaked.  Tennis shoes were a bad idea, but I have no boots other than steel toes.  Wet, cold, and hungry, we finished our reconnaissance.  For lunch, Cracker Barrel had the fireplace lit.  I changed clothes and cozied up to the flames.  A hearty meatloaf later, we were on the road, returning home.  Four hours later, the car was emptied, Rosebud was re-loaded, and I was home.

The collected data will be useful, as I'm starting on a new project.  Basically the site visit makes our 2-d maps much more useful, especially now that I have an idea of how the water will flow after a rain event.  When drawing drainage areas for watersheds, the USGS quad sheets are generally helpful, but aerials and real-world shots sometimes give a different result.  Next comes the actual drainage analysis, the studying of ditch flows and culvert discharges.  Should be interesting to see this go from start to finish.

The Great Flood of 8/4/2009

While here in Frankfort, my wife called to let me know that the University of Louisville was closed due to severe flooding. This flooding happened to 31 counties, including Franklin, which just so happens to be where Frankfort is. Ironically, I am in Frankfort studying flood control methods.

Naturally, this appealed to me, and once I got home I looked up some pictures of the damage. It's amazing how destructively beautiful nature is. Fortunately, but sadly, I was not in Louisville, so I did not get to see the flooding first-hand, but I have found some pictures that show the results of a large rainfall event over a short period of time. One site I've read says there was 18-20 feet of water on campus, with the central region being under 4 feet of water. People had to be rescued by boats even. Tragically, the main public library was flooded, and tens-of-thousands of books were destroyed. Cost estimates are over a million dollars in damages.

I couldn't find the exact rainfall data, but somewhere around 5 to 7 inches of precipitation fell. Since Louisville is predominately impervious (lots of concrete and rooftops), stormwater mitigation is a serious thing in the city. There was so much standing water pressure that there are reports of manhole coverings exploding from the streets.
Finally, a word of advice to those of you that happen to ever come upon a flooded street. DO NOT attempt to cross it. I know you hear this all the time, but still people try, and people still die, too. Just a little bit of water on a roadway can move quickly and have enough momentum to turn dangerous.

By the way, the top picture is from UofL's campus, the second looks to be some road somewhere, and the bottom picture is of Churchill Downs, the home of the Kentucky Derby. For more amazing pictures and info on this flood, check out the Weather Channel, or follow here. There are some pretty wild and crazy photos and videos out there.

A final thought. During my last semester at UofL, I took a Green Engineering course, where we discussed how poorly the campus drains and how much problems it has with a simple, low frequency rain event. In this class we came up with ideas for displacing some of the stormwater runoff. It would be nice if those methods were implemented, but I'm not sure how practical they would have stood up to this storm. My understanding is that the event was around a 40-year event, so I shudder to imagine what a 100-year flood would look like.

Sorry for the frenzy of writing this. It's terribly exciting, but I'm terribly exhausted. Thankfully, I found out this neat function in Blogger that allows you to specify a date and time for when to post, which I have implemented these past three days. In fact, if you read this between the hours of 8am and 4pm EST, then I will be in class and you will have experienced first-hand Google Robot Posting.

Stay warm, folks, and dry-ish. Remember, Don't drown, turn around.

Blogger's Block (Themed Trivia)

I'm running on fumes currently. It's not that I've nothing to write, it's that I've scattered my brains and don't know where to go with it from here. There're too many things I'm invested in; "The Curse of Daniel Stone" being one, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, work and things upcoming, understanding the Deeper Mysteries.

I recently heard an amazing lyric that I really liked, which got me thinking of contractions and how they can and should be used. It's from My Morning Jacket's Librarian.
"What is it inside our heads that makes us do the opposite
"Makes us do the opposite of what's right for us?
"Cause everything'd be great and everything'd be good
"If everybody gave like everybody could."

Isn't that an excellent contraction? Everything'd. I like it. Make's me glad I use the double contraction will'n't sometimes.

Today I officially become an uncle. My nephew is Jacob Ian Stewart, but I won't get to see him until the weekend, as I am away on a business trip learning the importance of HEC-RAS modeling and open channel flow concepts.

There's not much to report on other than that. I drove to the Capitol Building last night, but I did not have my camera on me, so I couldn't take a picture of it. Suffice it to say that it is quite impressive. (For those of you that don't know, Frankfort is the capital city of the Commonwealth of Kentucky, the most noble and prestigious of states.)

I also drove by Kentucky State University, which got me thinking about colleges and universities. It is amazing how all the buildings on most campuses look state-of-the-art and cutting edge, though inside there are still chairs and tables from decades past. Heck, even carpet and tile from decades ago. But still, the buildings themselves look pretty cool, and they seem to have this air about them that lets everyone know that Higher Learning is going on inside of them. I particularly like college libraries and research facilities.

How about some random trivia for you? The picture to the left shows a controlled experiment in a sluice gate, which is a laboratory modeling method of a natural or artificial stream. This allows the engineer (or whoever is interested) to study and analyze the affects of a Water Surface Profile, or the line the top of the water makes. Notice the obstructing block in the gate. If you look to the left of the block you'll see very choppy water, but if you went even further left the water would eventually stabilize. If you look to the far right of the block, you'll see stabilized water, but at a higher elevation than that of the far left. These stabilized regions are flowing at subcritical flow and are very steady. The very choppy region is the supercritical flow. The point near the left-edge of the block is the critical region, where the water is flowing at critical flow and is unpredictable. All of these characteristics are indicative of the water discharge, roughness of the channel, cross-sectional area of the sluice gate, and the channel bottom's slope. If you change any of those four factors you will generate a different looking water surface profile. Experimenting with different shaped blocks, weirs, and orifices create many different profiles, many of which are rather cool to observe in the lab.

That, friends, is just a small snippet of what it is that I do and what my Formal Education was all about. I sometimes wish that I would have had the desire to continue on and get my PhD, but I did not, though I do fancy it now and then.

I guess I'll just have to settle for the title of Darth and be done with it.

Stream Restoration

My posting has been sporadic here of late. I've been swamped, trying to finish everything I can for school before it's technically due. And, in fact, I have succeeded in that. I've only one large project to go, Advanced Hydrology, a graduate Capstone presentation to a review panel, and a few other presentations to give. Thus, practically all of my actual work is finished for the semester. Now I just have to present this stuff.

So, with that, I have volunteered to do some GIS work for the Stream Institute at the University of Louisville. The Stream Institute is a group that works with stream restoration and wetland development throughout Kentucky, and also some other states. I am in the class currently. Ultimately the goal is to restore a man-made stream into something natural looking. Doing this will lower shear stresses throughout the channel, thus reducing erosion and flooding only things that are meant to be flooded.

The project I'm doing actually sounds pretty cool. I have 60 digital aerial photos of the stream that is being researched. These images are circa 1970 and black & white. I am to import them into ArcMap, georeference them, and process them. Then, I am to import topo maps and compare the stream's position to the topo maps. Finally, I am to bring in current (2006) aerial photography and compare the stream.

Imagine a jigsaw puzzle. The black & white photos are the pieces. I have a topo map that serves as the box cover, letting me know what my goal is to look like. I am working with a mostly urban landscape. However, in the 70s it wasn't as urbanized. For me, I get to see, literally, how the land changed in 30 years.

The difficult part is actually finding where the pieces go. See, the topo map includes the entire county, and some of the neighboring county. The images may not all go adjacent, and most definitely will not fill the county. It's like having 60 jigsaw pieces to a 200 piece puzzle.

Once I get everything imported and processed, I'm essentially done. By learning how much a stream has moved over a given time, we can calculate how much sediment was deposited. I don't fully understand the rationale, but sediment deposits are officially counted as a pollutant.

It really is dramatic to see how much a stream has changed over the course of time. A well-intentioned farmer 10 miles downstream may have straightened out a channel to keep his farmland from flooding. Straightening a channel is never natural. In doing so, a headcut develops (usually) and works its way upstream, tearing through the soil like any normal person going through a Dairy Queen blizzard. The headcut is a destructive force in the stream, and can only be stopped with the appropriate amount of pool and riffle sequences, or if the headcut meets a culvert, etc.

Overall, the project seems like it will be interesting. I'm trying to finish as quickly as possible, but it seems like it'll take a while. On a related note, the 60 images were .TIFF files, huge image files that took up around 5 gigs. A friend recommended using irfanview to convert these .TIFFs to .JPEGs. I brought 5 gigs down to just over 700 megs, keeping the same quality and functionality. If you have image files, movie files, or sound files you need to convert, you should check it out.

I read the news today, oh boy, about a lucky man who made the grade...

Advanced Hydrology Term Project

For Advanced Hydrology we were given a semester project to work on. A big, long one that will require a lot of our time to do. In addition to the project, we have to create a presentation and write a fancy report. As a term project, you would expect us to have the entire term to be working on it, but, unfortunately that is not the case for Advanced Hydrology. We got the project on Monday. That's seven-days-until-the-end-of-the-semester Monday. Allow me to explain through question 1.

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Note: The first order Markov Model (order p=1) for Normally distributed flows can be expressed as: Xi,j+1=ux,j+1+px,j(1)*(sx,j+1/sx,j)*(Xi,j-ux,j)+tx,j+1*sx,j+1*sqrt(1-(px,j(1)^2)

Using both monthly flows Xi,j and Zi,j series at the streamflow gauging site:

i. Plot the time series

ii. Compute basic statistics like the mean, standard deviation, coefficient of skew and correlation coefficients between monthly flows. Note: This step will require the use monthly flows grouped by month like January together etc for series.

iii. Compute the auto-correlogram of the Zi,j series for a maximum of 12 lags of the time series treating it as a stationary series with no periodicity. Note: This step will treat the monthly flows as one combined time series. Hence the lags are accomplished by simply lagging the series by 1,2,3...12 times. Compare and comment on the differences between the auto-correlation for different lags from 1,2...12 with thos obtained for each month in Step (ii) above.

iv. Use the monthly correlation coefficient matrix from Step (i) to identify the order p for the Auto Regressive (AR) model both series.

v. Write out the complete format for the Autoregressive model to give Xi,j and Zi,j as a function of previous values of {Xi,j-1,Xi,j-2,...} or {Zi,j-1,Zi,j-2....} and other required components. This will look like the Markov Model (Eq. 15.17 which is for order 1, page 378 with additional lags if needed (see secion on Higher order Autoregressive models on page 379-380 equation 15.20 and 15.21, text). Note: If you have more than one order 1-R^2 term in Eq. 15.21 will be (1-p(1)^2-p(2)^2...)

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Everything above is typed as it appears on my sheet. The boldface is boldfaced. The typos are typo-d. Is it just me, or does reading through that stuff make your head hurt? I'm in a hydrology class, not an advanced statistics class. This entire semester has been statistics, statistics, probability, and more statistics. The only thing that makes it hydrologically related is the fact that we use streamflow data for our data to run statistical models on.

The ironic thing is I kind of enjoyed some of the statistical methods back at the beginning of the class. When we were running simple regression and analysis. Generating hypothesis tests. And then we got in to this weird, higher order stuff, and the entire class lost it.

Ah, well. I guess I'm supposed to complain. All students do, right? I've made it this long, with just o'er a week to go until school is done, so I can handle it. Once I get through question 1, I'll have question 2 to worry about.

Until then, I'll just keep on a chooglin.