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Team Number: 073 School Name: Logan School Area of Science: Physics Project Title: The Effect of El Nino on Ute Lake Project Abstract: http://mode.lanl.k12.nm.us/97.98/abstracts/073.html Interim Report: http://mode.lanl.k12.nm.us/97.98/interims/073.html Final Report: http://mode.lanl.k12.nm.us/97.98/finalreports/073/finalreport.html
The Logan High School Super Computer team has chosen to construct a C++ program for the 1998 Super computing Challenge. This program will allow us a greater comprehension of the possible affects of the winter weather front, commonly known as El Nino on Ute Lake. Our program will provide us with enough data to devise a plan to educate and prepare the community for the potential massive flooding of Ute Lake.
We have extensively searched for the accurate compassity or amount of water presently found in Ute Lake. Ute Lake is the second largest recreational lake in New Mexico. With the information we have gathered, the team has been able to determine the approximate size and shape of Ute Lake. Team members repeatedly searched the inter net through use of the application provided by Technet. We have researched many possible avenues for historical information concerning the amount of potential rainfall that the Logan, New Mexico area might receive during the course of El Nino's path. We needed to determine an estimation of the amount of the water that overflows the spillway of the dam (the largest Wier dam in the world) per minute, per hour of each week.
One of the many obstacles that we have encountered in the past several weeks of diligent effort has been that of the programming language. We believe that we now have a firm understanding of at least the basic part of the programming language. Having overcome our primary obstacle, we can now begin the focus of our program and the next steps in that process.
We plan to uncover the various effects of serious rainfall and thunderstorms caused this past year by El Nino. We still need to determine the amount of water needed to flood the dam and the average amount of precipitation we receive in the Ute Lake area on a yearly average. We would also need to find the size, strength, duration, and precipitation of an average storm. We will research historical data and determine the average number of storms in the Ute Lake area. We will then attempt to quantify the amount of precipitation that is required to ensure the water is rising enough to overflow the Ute Lake dam in this year of El Nino. The results of our study and data should tell us how long it might take in order to overflow the dam of Ute Lake, depending on the size, intensity, and duration of the storm. Using the main variables of our program as size, intensity, and duration of each storm, we will be able to predict with greater accuracy the amount of water required for the flooding of the Ute Lake dam.
We will need to complete our project using a super computer because the amount of precipitation caused by El Nino is too great to calculate on normal computer. In conclusion, we have not yet perfected our program, but we too, have not yet giving up. Our main goal this year is to complete all of our steps in this year's Super Computer Challenge.