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Team Number: 036 School Name: Shiprock High School Area of Science: Environmental Project Title: Flood Monitoring Project Abstract: http://www.challenge.nm.org/Abstacts/036.shtml Interim Report: http://www.challenge.nm.org/Interim/036.shtml Final Report: http://www.challenge.nm.org/FinalReports/036
There has been several floods in the past years. San Juan County although dry through the years it has had floods several times between the late 1980's - 1990's. The idea of the "High Waters" was decided by the team, because of our interest in Environmental Science.
Our project is on flood monitoring the San Juan and La Plata River. Although our community has had several floods, we do not anticipate for a flood. There are few farm areas and weather conditions do concern these people as for others the weather is not a great importance. Rain will help trees, flowers, and crops grow and give bodies of water more water, our main concern is driving conditions whether the roads are clean to travel on. Although we know there are flood warnings out there already, but by doing this project it helps us understand what a flood is, how quick it could occur, and how much rain water it would take to flood a certain area of a river. We hope that the data we collect from previous floods will help us predict if new floods would occur.
PROBLEM:Our project is to predict the volume of rain and the amount of time it will take for a flood to occur in a stream or an arroyo. We want to find a more effective way to warn people if a potential flood will occur.
Our project was to predict the volume of rain and the amount of time it will take for a flood to occur in a stream or an arroyo. We were planning to find a more effective way to warn people to evacuate a potential flood area.
We have researched two bodies of water, the San Juan River and La Plata River. Over the past few years, these two rivers have flooded and caused damage to surrounding areas. We have found information on the Internet, which we have combined with other information given to us. With this information we will calculate the base flow, routed flow, and runoff, which will determine where and when it will overflow. We are going to pin point floods that are going to happen. We have not yet gathered all the data, but we are still working on it. Another fall back would be the lack of proper measuring equipment. So far we did our research on the Internet. We found some sites that have helped a little with our project. The sites consist of graphs, statistics, rain fall, base flow, and location. We have not really found a way to use this information in our project; but we plan to use it to aid in reaching our conclusion. In our conclusion, we hope to find a better and more affective way to monitor the flow of a river.
Our project had several down falls. For one the weather was hard to work around. The winter was too long and it did not rain as much as we hoped. The weather changed until it came near to the end of our project. We have just collected data of past floods and worked with what we had.