What better way to start the semester than with a tale of a field trip? One thing I learned from this experience is that your work is never finished on a stream survey, even if your RTK system’s crapping out, it begins to pour and your labmate may or may not have been labeling your GPS control points on the riverbanks.

This was the first time the DiBiase lab employed our differential GPS to survey a decent-sized river, and this is the result:

That’s OK, just some really expensive equipment in some relatively deep water (Roman, before the trip: “At the deepest it gets to about here” [motions at his chest, which is of course over my head as a 5’3″ person]). RIP my polarized sunglasses when I tried to swim across holding some electronics. We collected bathymetry data, grain sizes, water surface level and flow velocity data, and we plan to incorporate our field data into model runs with Delft3D.

One of the best parts of the day was that the weather was actually great (a hot day made being in the water really pleasant).

The bad news was that, like every well-rounded stream survey the DiBiase team completes, I contracted some poison ivy. But this time my eyelids opened the next morning, so it’s an all-around improvement.