Initial Publication Date: September 16, 2020

Venkatesh Merwade: Using Modeling Flood Hazards in CE 54200 - Hydrology at Purdue University-Main Campus

About this Course

Upper level undergraduate or first year graduate level for civil engineering, environmental engineering, agricultural engineering and agronomy students.

students

Two 50 minute lecture sessions and one 50 minute lab session

CE 54200 Hydrology Course Syllabus (Acrobat (PDF) 509kB Jun18 20)

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Show more about the course goals and content

After taking this course, students will able to: (i)Describe the hydrologic cycle, its components and reservoirs; (ii) Perform water balance of a hydrologic system; (iii) Apply various hydrologic concepts to compute basic hydrologic fluxes such as infiltration, evapotranspiration and streamflow; (iv) Simulate the hydrology of a watershed using HEC-HMS hydrology model; and (v) Use MS Excel to perform hydrologic computations and plot hydrologic data

My class included upper level undergraduate and entry level graduate students interested in learning the hydrologic cycle and its different components. After learning all the different processes starting from rainfall and ending with streamflow, this module provided a way to bring some of these topics together in a module that showed the practical implementation of these concepts to address a societal issue - flooding.

Given the recent major flooding disasters in the United States and around the world, students were excited to this module. This module helped students work in teams and see the connection between the conceptual/theoretical topics in class to the data and modeling tools to address flooding issues.

My Experience Teaching with GETSI Materials

This is the first implementation of this module so I had to re-arrange my teaching schedule to include it in the course. Overall, I am pleased with the implementation and students enjoyed the module, I plan to make it a part of my course going forward.

Relationship of GETSI Materials to my Course

I implemented the module towards the end of my 16-week long course. Most of the basic hydrologic concepts were covered prior to the module implementation. I integrated flood frequency analysis and river channel hydraulics course material with the module. This module enabled including HEC-RAS modeling, which was a new addition to the course. The module was implemented over a period of five weeks.

A Unit-by-Unit Breakdown of How I Taught this Module

Unit 1

This included a lecture using the slides for Unit 1. After finishing the slides in 40 minutes, the last 10 minutes were used to form six group with five students in each group. As the class included a mix of graduate and undergraduate students, a graduate student was picked from each group to lead the activity and turn in the final product (presentation). The lab session was used for groups to work on the activity. This unit requires working with GIS. Although some students did not have any prior experience, many of them or at least one member in their group was able to use the resources provided to finish the tasks. Initially, I had planned for each group to make a presentation. However, due to time constraint and repetitive nature of message from each group, they were asked to just submit the powerpoint slides. This unit required one lecture session and one lab session.

Unit 2

This unit blended well with flood frequency analysis that I usually cover in my course. The lecture and the in-class exercise spanned across two lecture sessions.

Unit 3

Unit 3 was covered in one lecture using the slides for this unit. This also included one in-class assignment on how to use Manning's equation for a single cross-section.

Unit 4

Unit 4, which mainly involves running HEC-RAS, was implemented in a lab session as a follow-up to Manning's equation discussed in Unit 3. Students were able to finish the lab in one 50-min session. Although I gave one week to finish the exercise, most students were able to finish it sooner than that.

Unit 5

This was the final summative assessment module. Each student was randomly given one of the five study sites from the list. All students were able to finish the exercise without much help. I did share the report rubric with students for them to organize their thoughts and report.

Assessments

I simply used the student exercises and the associated rubric to grade all their work. Overall, the students did not complain about the work and their grades.

Outcomes

Honestly, since this was the first time implementation of the module, my goal was to make sure it is completed in time as it was done towards the end. My initial plan was to implement this over a period of six weeks but I did it over five weeks and left the dead-week open for students to work on their other courses/projects. Overall, I am pleased with the implementation and students enjoyed the module, I plan to make it a part of my course going forward.

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