Source water separation lab preparation

This lab uses learning materials and data from the Dry Creek Experimental Watershed in Idaho. Many thanks to Boise State University for this resource. Here is a spreadsheet template you may want to download to follow along with the following exercises.

Click to download the Excel spreadsheet

You may also want to download the data from 2009 to follow along with this exercise (go to link and click on the download icon to get a copy). These data are also available from the Dry Creek Watershed web page.

Click this link to download the csv file

Let's get started by importing hydrograph and electrical conductivity data to our spreadsheet (10:22 min).

Once the data are available in the spreadsheet, we can visualize the hydrograph for the 2009 calendar year (9:00 min).

The annual hydrograph will help us select data for a storm response to analyze (5:34 min).

For the storm we selected, let's get some practice with basic hydrograph separation (16:42 min).

Now we can calculate the total volume of event flow and baseflow to help explore the nature of runoff response for a summer storm in this watershed (8:53 min).

If we consider the mass conservation equations for water and total dissolved solids (as represented by specific electrical conductivity), we can apply mixing models to estimate how much of stream flow is precipitation water (i.e., "new" water) or water that was already stored in the watershed (i.e., "old" water) (8:02 min).

We can then add plots to the graph showing the source water separation results throughout the storm response hydrograph (3:44 min).