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

[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 Civil Engineering Forum)

 

[Fizzhead]

cah20eng:

Have encountered this problem before when working for an international consulting company. We started out analyzing data available from the government, demonstrated to the client the variability of the data and then set up our own testing stations and got improved data. This was the standard company approach to such a situation.

 

[PUMPDESIGNER]

I recommend you setting up your own testing and data aquisition system, since you are going to have to stand good for your design, you might as well get paid for the primary information you base your designs on.

Data loggers have become very cheap, and you can write Spreadsheets to provide multiple graphs for each data set, and play with that to produce the output you need.

Lots of money though to set up, becomes much easier in the future if you have people to write the spreasheets and implement the sensors.

Problem with scrounging around for outside data sources is format, presentation, accuracy unverified, spotty, lots of time searching and working with multiple data sets.

We set up our own system and enjoy it greatly. Cheap and fast now because we have been doing it for more than 20 years. Problem though, long term data such as Rainfall patterns, lake levels, etc. is not easy or fast to do your own, so you still must obtain those elsewhere.

We have sources that have proven reliable for some of those data sets such as the Oregon Climate Center which maintains records for most of North America for the Feds with Federal funds.

PUMPDESIGNER