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Hydro Data

Examples: HydroData

Bill Locke and Dave Mogk, Montana State University

The geosciences provide great opportunities to access both real-time and archived datasets on natural systems. Here are examples of use of data at two different instructional levels:

1. Geology 102, Environmental Geology, no pre-requisites, dominantly non-science majors, 60 students enrolled in three labs with twenty students each. This exercise introduces students to accession, downloading and analysis of archived datasets, specifically US Geological Survey hydrologic data. Students initially access existing hydrographs that cover near-real time displays from the previous week. Students encounter the processed data from the USGS website, and then interpret the data in terms of daily temperature fluctuations, precipitation events, evapotranspiration, etc. Students are asked to reflect on data collection, delivery, processing and presentation (i.e. what is the relationship between river discharge and stage?). Then students look at annual archived data for a local stream to begin to distinguish noise vs. signal on many scales. Linear vs. logarithmic scales are used to represent natural systems that vary over many orders of magnitude. These activities ask students to analyze pre-processed data. The final exercise requires students to select, import, parse, and clean raw data on annual flood, discharge, stage and date from the USGS site on an Excel spread sheet. Operations performed on the data include: sort by date (to determine pattern of timing of peak flow, earliest, latest, modal), graphing (relation of discharge to stage on a scattergram), and application of a formula to determine recurrence interval. Analysis of the data includes prediction, interpolation and extrapolation.

2. Geology 581, Quaternary Environments, graduate level, 6-10 students. This ice core exercise educates students about the availability of archived paleoclimate data and provides them with the opportunity to perform analyses of these data at a near-professional level. Two datasets are accessed, one from Vostok Station, Antarctica and the other from Greenland (GRIP database). The databases are not directly comparable in terms of their measured parameters (e.g. methane, CO2, oxygen isotope, temperature differential, dust, ice age, gas age, and depth). Students are asked to formulate a question or hypothesis and to look for correlations among any two variables. Operations include importation of data, transformation to a common scale, and statistical analysis using functions available on Excel. A short report is required that describes the question, approach, supporting statistics, and outcomes. This is effectively a research experience, the only difference being that the primary data were collected from other sources. There are published results in the literature to which the students can compare their interpretations.

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