Team: 34
School: La Cueva High
Area of Science: Earth and Space Sciences
Proposal: River flooding may destroy neighboring farm fields and prevent crops from growing. It would be useful to predict in what places the Rio Grande and connecting irrigation channels will flood in the case of heavy rains, and also provide locations of “barriers†that will decrease the amount of flooding in the area. To create a starting model, I plan to use surface chemical reaction networks (CRN’s) with the states of each cell being the elevation and water level to predict water flow. To get the elevation data, I plan to use the GeoElevation function from Mathematica. A challenge will be to get the water levels in the river and also the specific locations of the riverbanks. Afterwards, I would like to modify the surface CRN simulator to account for more variables such as velocity and soil absorption. The approach will use hexagonal or square automata to predict water levels in each cell. It would be interesting to later use different water flow simulators such as HEC-RAS, HEC-HMS, and Flood Modeller to see how the results compare.
Mentor: Darko Stefanovic
Team Members:
Sponsoring Teacher: Yolanda Lozano