Hydraulic/Environmental Data -- How do YOU get it? 1

[cah2oeng]

Hello,

I'm doing a bit of research on how consulting firms and hydraulic modelers accomplish their environmental data collection, specifically obtaining flow rates, contaminant concentration, temperature, dissolved oxygen, etc... in rivers, lakes, and near shore coastal environments. Many times, data logged by the government (a USGS bubbler at a gaging station, for example) will be spotty, or at the very least, of questionable accuracy.

When you require this type of information for a project, how do you go about getting it? Do you have an "in-house" shop that can go collect this data? Do you contract it out? Do you use publicly available data collected by a government agency? Or do you simply *not* gather the data at all and qualify the results of your study?

I'm curious to hear about others' experience with this problem of getting reliable environmental data.

Thanks.

(This will also be posted in the Fluid Mechanics Forum)

 

[agsgeophysics]

I am a geologist with 10 yrs experience in the environmental consulting field, the last 2 for small company I started specializing in geophysics, hydrogeology, and soil/groundwater remediation. I have done some modeling, primarily groundwater - but surface water modeling is similar.

Typically, most of your data collected in-house. Water levels are acquired from wells (gw) or you can construct stilling wells for surface water measurements. Long term observations can be collected by installing transducers. Physical parameters such as pH, DO, ORP, temp, cond, etc are typically collected during sampling events at which time samples for chemical analyses are collected and sent to fixed labs.

That's the typical process but it all depends on the site, client, etc. Sometimes data from government agencies or other outside sources can be useful (USGs gauging stations, airport weather records, etc). Let me know if you have any more specific questions.