ENGINEERING HYDROLOGY - Assignment Example

Imagine that you are a consultant preparing this for a committee within the Environment Agency, for the purposes of reviewing the hydrology of the catchments to (i) develop an understanding of the water resources of the catchments (with a view to considering the feasibility of constructing impoundments to create more storage) and (ii) evaluate flood risks. The investigation is of a very preliminary nature and is not intended as a pre-feasibility study, but rather just an intelligent use of existing data and desktop techniques. a. First go to the National River Flow Archive and locate the Thrushel at Tinhay station (047008).

Print out the station and catchment details and save the pdf of the long term hydrograph for this station and save the 'Long-term data file' as a csv (comma separated value format) file. Repeat this step for the Wallington at North Fareham (042001). b. Now read through the station and catchment details for both, noting the location of the stations and their respective catchment areas and record lengths. Visually compare the two long term hydrographs; look carefully at the scale of their axes and hydrograph shapes.

By reading through the catchment descriptions and your knowledge of the UK climate you should already be able to think of reasons why they are so different, despite having the same catchment area of about 112km2. You can undertake a s. Repeat this step for the Wallington at North Fareham (042001).b. Now read through the station and catchment details for both, noting the location of the stations and their respective catchment areas and record lengths. Visually compare the two long term hydrographs; look carefully at the scale of their axes and hydrograph shapes.

By reading through the catchment descriptions and your knowledge of the UK climate you should already be able to think of reasons why they are so different, despite having the same catchment area of about 112km2. c. You may need you use the Pivot Table feature in Excel to summarise your monthly statisticsFor the flood frequency analysis, you will need to obtain the annual maximum series (AMS) for these two stations from the HiFlows website:http://www.environment-agency.gov.uk/hiflowsuk/You can undertake a station search and obtain the AMS data from the menu on the left hand side.

You need the date column and the discharge - do not use the ranking assigned in this dataset as it is in the opposite order to that required by Davie (2003)AnalysisAs a minimum your analysis should include:Frequency histograms of flowBar charts of monthly flow characteristicsFlow duration curves (plotted on the same set of axes)Comparative estimates of Q95, Q75, Q50, Q25 and Q10Estimate the 1:2, 1:5, 1:10, 1:20, 1:30 floods using the Weibull and Gringorten formulaeEstimate the 1:60 flood using the Gumbel method of moments approachYou may also use any of the methods as outlined in the Flood Estimation Handbook (FEH)Any other techniques that you might see as being appropriateYou need to critically evaluate your findings and provide recommendations for