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USGS scientists continue to monitor streamflow during the historic flooding taking place in Fargo, N.D. This information provides critical information used to estimate flood dangers and helps protect lives and property. Also available in: YouTube  |
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File Size: 5566881 bytes Duration: 2:15 Released: Mon, 30 Mar 2009 16:29:03 UTC |
Transcript:
Jennifer LaVista: Flood waters are rising in many parts of the north-central United States. Scientists from the U.S. Geological Survey are monitoring streamflow measurements which are critical to the National Weather Service in order to make flood forecasts. I followed them around for much of the day and here's what I saw.
Joel Galloway: We've been measuring the stream flow in the Red River Valley. There's been a lot of rivers coming up. There's a large snowpack this winter and we've been measuring the streamflow as these water rise this spring.
The way we measure the streamflow is that we use an acoustic doppler current profiler and what that does is it it sends these signals down to the bottom in all different directions to measure the velocity of the stream as you are going across the stream. So it's measuring what the depth is from the top to the bottom and then using the velocity and the depth they can determine what the volume is over time.
Chris Laveau: Today we measured two sites. The town of Fargo is threatened so we measured a site below Fargo. We measured 14,000 cfs and if you think of a cfs, it's about the size of a basketball so we measured 14,000 basketballs. And at Fargo today, we measured 26,000 basketballs. The typical average at Fargo for this time of year would be 600 basketballs.
Jennifer LaVista: That levy is how high?
Chris Laveau: Roughly 15 feet, higher than the normal stream level. They just put it in about a week ago.
The USGS maintains 75 stream gauges in the Red River Valley in which we constantly throughout the year maintain the equipment, but particularly during flood times, we visit them on an every-other-day basis in order to maintain that equipment and keep track of the elevation of the river so that agencies like the National Weather Service have good information on which to base their flood forecasts that they use to help protect the region.
Without stream gauges in place, flood waters in particular the timing and magnitude of events would be unknown and people would be caught unaware. By providing real-time information, we are allowing people to adapt to changing weather or water conditions in this instance and in the case of Fargo, it is to get more sand bags and raise their levy.
Jennifer LaVista: Scientists will continue to make streamflow measurements and report out to state local agencies until the flood waters have receded.
Reporting from Fargo, North Dakota, I'm Jennifer LaVista.
