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Equipment

Each automated stream monitoring station continuously measures water stage and flow, temperature, conductivity, and rainfall.

The standard equipment layout is:

• A walk-in shelter equipped with AC power and a phone line.
• A tipping bucket rain gauge for collection of rainfall data.
• Sample lines which run from the shelter to the stream. These sample lines contain sampler tubing, heat tape, a conductivity/temperature probe and bubbler cords. These cords are attached to a surface (fence post, large rock) within the stream.
• A Campbell CR10X datalogger, which controls the instruments and writes a data record every fifteen minutes for stage and/or flow, temperature, conductivity and rainfall.
• A stage measurement device, which is usually a bubbler/pressure transducer system. Sites without this system are equipped with an ultrasonic sensor.
• A stage reference guide, usually a staff gage or a wire weight gage.
• Either a 24 bottle standard automatic sampler or 1 bottle automatic sampler. Some samplers are refrigerated.

Rating Curve Development

Rating curves have been developed for all sites. Some of the rating curves are based on historical U.S. Geological Survey data or other historical data. Rating curves are also being continually developed with field measurements. Equipment used to generate measurements include:

• Dye drip/Fluorometer method.
• Marsh-McBirney Flow meter, which is used to calculate discharge.
• Acoustic Doppler Current Profiler (ADCP), which gives a complete picture of the stream channel geometry and flow velocity across a transect.
• USGS Price meter with the Aqua Calc 5000.