Download Watershed Monitoring Plan: Current Data, Existing Programs, and Proposed Improvements - Pr and more Study notes Environmental Science in PDF only on Docsity! ESM 224 Expected information in Deliverable #5 The objective in this section is to describe the current monitoring data available for your watershed, any existing WQ monitoring programs (if they are documented online) and more importantly propose a comprehensive monitoring plan for your watershed in support of the WMP effort. Provide a short introduction to your report and a summary. The core of the report is the characterization of current monitoring and your proposed plan. 1. Flow monitoring Follow the instructions in the User’s Guide, Section 7.3, to obtain information about the various USGS gage stations in your watershed. Note that you may have already downloaded the data for these gage stations using BASINS 4.0, but the USGS NIWS website can help you to determine the dates in which the gage stations were active, and therefore which stations will be most useful for your analysis. In some cases, even a station that has been discontinued may be useful, since it may be the only info available to estimate flows in a particular catchment. For your analysis, create a table with the gage stations available from the USGS, indicating the period of record. Provide a map with the location of the stations. Using either the graphics from the USGS website or processing gage station data in Excel, provide a few key hydrographs for your watershed, with the mean, min. and max. flows for that location over the time period of interest, hopefully several years (~10 would be useful). Compare these flows to the precipitation data that you obtained from NOAA for your WARMF model, in terms of timing of storms vs. observed peak flows. It doesn’t have to be on the same graph (although you can do it if you prefer). 2. Current Water Quality monitoring Follow the instructions in the User’s Guide, Section 7.4, to obtain information about the various STORET WQ stations in your watershed. Use the approach in Section 7.4.2 to gather the info for the various stations. For your analysis, create a table with the STORET WQ stations available, indicating the agency that collected the data, the period of record and the WQ parameters that are being monitored. Provide a map with the location of the stations. Given the information available from the 303(d) listings, plot WQ data related to these impairments for a few “key” locations in your watershed. Key means that they are in the main stem of the river and passing through regions where one would expect higher impact from the land uses. These would be “integrator” stations – they integrate information from various areas in the watershed. If there are other WQ monitoring efforts in your watershed (from some of the stakeholder groups you identified in Section 1), provide some details: type of monitoring (agency, volunteer), locations, frequency, parameters
