Week of 6 Oct 97

Read through Ch 3 of Ann's draft report. Gave her editorial comments.

Tried to resolve the files in the TBNEP CDROM against the files that Ann used for her project. Wrote down possible files from TBNEP ROM that might be useable. Will get with Ann to see what data I may need to try to find or resolve how I can use data from the ROM.

Logged onto the Unix machine at LRC and began to learn how to navigate around there.

Tried to do Exercise 2 on delineating watersheds. Seemed to be successful with FTPing the file, but when I tried to begin, Arc-Info said it couldn't file the Ausfil coverage. Not sure what the deal is.

Got an email from Bruce Follansbee saying that they were not able to read the file that I tried to send them via the FTP site. He did give me an email address for Roxanna (she now has email that will accept files attached). I have sent the Data dictionary to Bruce via Roxanna.

Spoke with Dr. Maidment regarding the data dictionary and inventory of files in comparison with files needed for the CCBNEP project. We are missing the most basic file, the DEM file. I have emailed Bruce Follansbee to request this. I will be sorting the file inventory to group files that are similar or related. Dr. Maidment has also asked that I try to get ESRI's ArcExplorer off the net. He is interested in trying to take some of the files from the CDROM and using ArcExplorer to view them and creating some products for the TBNEP office. I will begin with trying to make a basic map project showing basin boundaries, streams, roads, measurement stations, CAFOs, NPDES points, towns.

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Week of 13 Oct 97

Tried to download ArcExplorer from the ESRI homepage. Had a problem. Sent email to service email address. Will wait for reply.

First draft of reorganized inventory, sorted into groups of data that are similar or related.

Met with Dr. Barrett and Dr. Olivera to discuss direction. We will push to get some rainfall and streamflow data for whatever gauges we can. Dr. Barrett asked me to begin working on separating baseflow from streamflow. I will use Dr. Olivera's fortran program to do this. Dr. Olivera agreed to get me a copy of the compiled program. He also gave me direction on which chapter of his dissertation to review for the methodology.

Sent an email to Roxanna Hinzman asking for any streamflow data that they have for the relatively new gauges. Also, asked if she knew a POC with the ODF for getting rainfall data from the gauge at the upstream point of the Wilson River. Also asked if there were other lowland areas in OR or WA that were gauged in the lowland area that we could use for the Tillamook area.

Downloaded the Wilson River historical flow data from the USGS. The web site URL is http://water.usgs.gov/swr/. The flow station number for the Wilson River is #14301500. You will have to point and click on the state of Oregon, and then give it the Station #. Alternately, you can search by county (Tillamook) and select the station that you want. When you go to retrieve the data, be sure to specify that you want the date in the YY/MM/DD format. Then tell it to retrieve the data. You should then save the data as a .txt file. You can then open the file in excel. It will determine that it is delimited data and walk you through steps to convert it. You can then save the data as a .xls file.

 Directions for Downloading historical flow data. Under the title "Water Data" select "Historical (NWIS)". This will bring you to the Surface Water Retrieval page. Click on the state of Oregon. If you know the USGS station number, you may enter it immediately, otherwise, you will have to use a search to get it. Search by using the list of counties and selecting Tillamook county. We want the Wilson River and Trask River gauges. At this time you can make a note of the gauge numbers for future reference. Select the Trask River to begin downloading the data for this gauge. You can do the same thing for the Wilson River. Select "Historical Streamflow Daily Values Data". Select the period of time (you will eventually want to download both sets) and specify that you want a Tab-Delimited Text file with date in the format MM/DD/YYYY. Once it finishes downloading, you will want to save this as a .txt file. You will then be able to open this in Excel. Be sure that you have a decent amount of time to do this because the download is painfully slow!

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Week of 20 Oct 97

Finished dowloading all of the Wilson River and Trask River files from USGS. It is currently 3 files (1 for Wilson River and 2 for Trask River). Wilson River file covers period 8/1/31 - 9/30/55. The Trask River data is in two periods: 7/1/31 - 9/30/55 and 10/1/61 - 6/30/72.

Met with Dr. Olivera to discuss the use of the BFLOW program to separate baseflow from direct runoff (really, more precisely, the quicker flow from the slower flow). He will put the executable file on the CRWR server. We discussed the format for the input files and some of the specifics about using the program.

Began a cursory analysis of a few years worth of data from the two rivers to get a feel for the N value needed for the program (the number of days of the runoff flow). Developed a number of graphs to visually inspect this.

Decided based on discussion with Dr. Barrett to try N values of 3, 4, and 5. Formulated the input files for the BFLOW program (4 files per N value, two sets of data for each of the two rivers) and conducted several runs for N values of 3, 4, and 5. All three appeared to overestimate the baseflow, so I did several more runs on one set of data using N values of 6, 7, and 8.

Downloaded the ArcExplorer file from ESRI.

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Week of 27 Oct 97

Met with Dr. Barrett and Dr. Olivera to discuss the results that I got from the BFLOW runs. It appears that a value of 5 or 6 will be appropriate. We discussed trying to get a feel for the sensitivity to the N value. Possibly looking at taking all of the data for a particular river, combining it, and determining overall percentage baseflow. Then plot N versus percent baseflow for both rivers.

Completed the sensitivity analysis for N values and came up with plot of N versus percent baseflow for both rivers.

Began to work on a report section outlining the baseflow separation.

Downloaded data for 6 precipation stations in Tillamook County from the ClimateData CR-ROMs at CRWR. The six stations are associated time periods are:

Still have not been able to talk with Kellie Vache regarding flow data and rainfall data for the gauge in the bay.

Got an email from Bruce Follansbee of TBNEP saying that he had put the DEM file on their server. However, when I went to retrieve it, I could not find it. Have an email in to him to verify where it is.

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Week of 3 Nov 97

 Met with Mike to discuss N values. The separation of baseflow is somewhat sensitive to N, but it is as expected, i.e., as N gets larger, the percent of baseflow gets smaller. This is because smaller values of N assign more of the flow to baseflow. We decided to use an N value of 5.

The next issue is to get all of the data together. I have received a file from the Oregon Dept of Forestry that has hourly precip data for the South Fork station which is located XXXX up the Wilson River. I spoke with Kellie Vache of E&S in Corvalis regarding flow data and precip data from the TBNEP office. He said that this data is being QC'd. He is supposed to email me with a date to expect that data to be available. Got word back from Bruce Follansbee regarding the 30m DEM file. He gave me to username and password to be able to retrieve this file from their ftp site (oes.orst.edu).

Need to determine which of the rain gauges from the ClimateData CD-ROM is the gauge in the valley - presumably at the radio station. Since I have the latitude and longitude coordinates of each of the six stations, I figured that I could create a project in ArcView and use the arrow to position the pointer at about where I thought the gauge should be, and read off the coordinates. Unfortunately, the coordinates that I have for the gauges is in geographic projection and the data from TBNEP is in Lambert Conformal Conic.

I created a point coverage for the stations using the geographic lat and long numbers. Paco then helped me to step through projecting this into the Lambert Conformal Conic projection. The data used for this projection is as follows:

In working with Paco on this projection, we discovered that the layers folder does not have an info file associated with it. For this reason, we will not be able to work with these files in ArcInfo. Paco suspects that this is a result of files being dropped and dragged using file manager. So, I am going to (with Seann's help) write an aml script to import all of the coverages using the .ee0 files, thus creating an info file. Once this is done, I will burn a new ROM with everything on it.

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Week of 10 Nov 97

Got all of the coverages that were available in the /exports directory of the TBNEP CDROM imported with an ArcInfo aml script. There are several coverages that are under the layers directory of the CDROM that were not available as export files. These are aspect, roads, slope, and tillveg. There was also an additional export file called "tepts.e00" that I am not sure what it covers. The imported coverages (layers) are on the unix machine in /home/ferdi/patrice/cover and they now have an info file asociated with them. Also unzipped and untarred the 30m DEM file from TBNEP. These files are on the unix machine in /home/ferdi/patrice/deliv3.

Added a field on the rainfall stations point coverage that I created to add the name of the station. Mike and I tried to reconcile that were they were made sense (using a map of Tillamook) and it appears that they do. I probably should try to verify this when I am up there.

Spoke with Kellie Vache (of E&S) regarding data that he is going to get to me. I verified exactly what he will be sending:

Week of 17 Nov 97

Delineated the watershed from the dem file (elev_g7) that TBNEP sent. I found out after the fact that it was not in the same projection as all of the coverages on the TBNEP ROM. So, went and projected the grid into the same projection. Then reaccomplished the delineation. I followed Maggie's exercise that she created for the COE to do this. I did the delineation using 10K as the minimum number of cells for a basin.

I also looked at the rivers delineated from the dem using map calculator. I selected the flow accumulation grid and looked for cell values > 10K. In some spots the delineated rivers match the actual rivers somewhat, but in many places the delineated rivers are fairly far off from actual. So, I am going to have to burn in the rivers. Ann has suggested using the "Agree" method that she and Ferdi used. However, I am going to need an alternate source to use for my actual rivers. The rivers on the TBNEP ROM are polygons, and you must have lines to do the burn in process. Some possibilities are to use RF3 files, DLG files, or the streams coverage from the ROM.

Set up my visit to Tillamook for the first full week of January. Bruce Follansbee will make the arrangements for airline ticket, rental car, and hotel.

Once I get the data from K. Vache, I will need to add in all of the flow gauge stations and the rain gauge stations so that we have those on ArcView. Will need to reconcile which gauges I already have a coverage for versus what new I receive.

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Week of 24 Nov 97

Used screen capture to show discrepancies between delineated rivers and digitized rivers from TBNEP CDROM.

This is a picture of the delineated watersheds vs. the digitized rivers from the ROM.

This is a picture showing a closeup of the discrepancies between the delineated rivers and the digitized rivers over the delineated watershed boundaries.
Note: The digitized rivers are in purple and the delineated rivers showup as blocks/grid cells.

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Week of 1 Dec 97

Spent some time with Dr. Olivera and Dr. Barrett discussing the best method to burn in the rivers. I will follow the convention in Dr. Olivera's dissertation where you add 1000 ft to the dem and then merge the river file with it. The river file that is on the CD is actually a polygon coverage. So, I will need to convert it to a grid. There is also a potential problem with the fact that there are island segments in the lriver coverage and the polygons are not continuous. So, the first thing was to get rid of the island segments. I accomplished this by adding a field in the lriver attributes table with a clarifier - 1 for river, 0 for island. Then I converted the polygon coverage to a grid file using the polygrid command. Then I used a conditional statement to pickup only those segments that were 1, thus leaving of f the islands. In theory, I could take this grid layer and use arctools to fill in the gaps as needed and make sure I didn't have short-circuiting. However, when I pulled up the grid created, it has very few cells that actually got converted to a grid. So, I would have to edit a lot! I discussed this with Ann and Dr. Barrett. We aren't really sure what is going on. Dr. Olivera was not available. However, it seems like there may be a problem with the river coverage as far as useability. May be able to use RF1 or RF3 files. Will take this up again after Christmas.

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Semester Break

 Met with the TBNEP office in Oregon for a week. Found out that they have decided to change the projection of all the files - the new CDROM has everything with the new projection. Also, found out that a subcontractor, ALSEA, is creating a hydrology layer that will have all the rivers, streams, ditches, and tidal gates digitized. This should be ready by mid January. We will most likely use this to burn in the rivers and streams.

Spent quite a bit of time with Bruce Follansbee and Roxanna Hinzman talking about what factors they want to take into account for the bacteria and sediment loads. Here is a summary:

Bacteria sources:

- CAFOs

-- Bob Pedersen is going to get 1000# cow units for each permit. This can be related to #s of manure produced - will be ready in about 2 months

-- We may also get

--- Management practices

--- Manure storage practices

-- Alsea is is working on the riparian area mapping (fencing, bridges, trees planted) - about 1 month to get

-- May be able to get the acreage of farm, translate that into a number of grid cells and then assign a value to it. If can’t get acreage, will need to come up with some other method.

-- Use the 1000# cow units to work up a value of bacteria load to assign to "dairy" cells

-- How do we define the reduction for each BMP?

-- May need to go from a point coverage for CAFO to a number of grid cells; all info will get linked to a table for the CAFO point coverage

-- Pasture versus hayfield - bacti loading will be different for the two, but there is not way to differentiate between the two and they can change over time; need to get a value that is an average of the two and apply to all ag lands

- Septic tanks

-- Alsea is working on a coverage that puts red polygons around dwellings. Any dwellings outside of the urban boundaries will be considered to have a septic tank.

-- Try to get a number of acres per house maybe

-- Dept of Health may have a number of percent of septic tanks that fail; can use in assigning values

-- The coverage from Alsea will differentiate between farm (F) and rural residential (R/R). A farm (that may include several buildings) will only have one septic system assigned to it.

-- Idaville may be different as far as # of acre/house. Maybe tax lot coverage could help.

-- Value of bacti associated with failing septic tank??? Maybe Dept of Health?

- STPs/NPDES

-- There are only 4 on the outfall coverage - missing at least one, maybe two sources

-- How will we get values to assign?

-- Issue of flooding and bypass - how do we deal with this?

- Log Decks (2 of them) and 1 log deck waste pile

-- The runoff from them goes into a specific stream

-- NEP has values for them (I think)

-- They need to be added to some coverage - maybe an industry coverage?

- Forest/Ag Interface

-- Tim Sullivan has this info

Sediment Sources:

- Landslides

-- Decide on a buffer zone around streams/rivers (maybe 50m)

-- There will be 6 different classes

--- Within buffer, upgraded road

--- Within buffer, not upgraded road

--- Outside of buffer, upgraded road

--- Outside of buffer, not upgraded road

--- Non road area, recently harvested

--- Non road area, not recently harvested

-- Within each of these 6 classes there will be 3 slope classifications

-- There is no age of roads in the info we currently have.

-- Will have to get each forester (15 or so "regions") to take a map and mark the roads that are probably not upgraded and therefore suspect

-- An alternative is to try to find out which areas were harvested when; those harvested after the FPA practices went into effect should be upgraded

- Farm roads

-- This is a large unknown currently

-- Bruce will ask around to see if this is an appreciable source

-- If it is determined to be an appreciable source, then we need to figure out how to address it

-- Maybe come up with a buffer zone, look at roads that are within the zone

- Stream bank erosion in the lowlands

-- Maybe use data from NRCS to estimate bank erosion

-- Use the presence of riparian vegetation/fencing to say it doesn’t erode

-- 1978 sediment report will probably be useful; Bruce looking at it

-- May use the 1978 data and update it to today (using the Kilchis information to correlate); spread this load over the length of the river from the forest/ag interface to bay.

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20-30 Jan

Spent some time reading background data on TBNEP and past studies. Also began looking at a tool called EPIC, developed by USAD/ARS group in Temple, TX. Dr. Maidment wants to look at the possibility of using this tool to come up with a consistent way to estimate sediment loads in the lowland pasture area. A couple of people from the Temple group were in visiting on23 Jan, so I spoke with them a bit about the possibility. Dowloaded all of the files, unzipped them, and installed them. Also downloaded the user's manual and began looking at the parameters required, what the model can do, how specific you can get with it. Have been able to use the Utilities program to create an example input file, run the program, and gotten an output file. Have contacted the Temple group about spending a half day with them to get some hands on training. I am hoping that I can explain what we want to do and get some help from them about how to structure the input file. Talked with Dr. Maidment and Dr. Barrett about using the PRISM grid of annual rainfall for Oregon and the long term data at the radio station gage (data from the NCDC CDROM - station Tillamook 1W) to come up with an estimate of gaged rainfall at the Wilson River USGS gage. Will need to use a couple of Arc scripts developed by other students to figure out what drains to the Wilson River gage and then start working on a rainfall/runoff coefficient. Also received a CDROM from E&S - began looking at the data there.

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Week of 2 Feb

Created point coverages (as shape files with a dbf file associated with them) of the Wilson River gage and the Tillamook 1W rain gage using a script written by Ann Quenzer. Had a couple of bugs that we had to work out, but finally got them both created. Then converted them to an ArcInfo coverage using the shapearc command, and then projected them from geographic coordinates to the TBNEP coordinates.

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Week of 9 Feb

Began working with Ann Q to delineate the watershed drainage area above the Wilson River gage. Will not need to worry about burning in streams in this area because there is enough terrain here, unlike the lowland pasture area which is very flat. Have run into some bugs with the script and are working on those. Finished the delineation above the Wilson River gage. Click here to see the drainage area (I realize the colors aren't the best but I think it provides enough contrast). The red gage is the USGS gage on the Wilson River. The blue gage is the rain gage at the radio station. Also began work to clean up the daily rainfall data that I have for the rain gage at the radio station. Will look at the annual sum of measured rainfall and the number of days of data missing in a year.

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Week of 16Feb

Finished the clean up of the rainfall data. There are some days of missing data. Assuming that the missing values are randomly distributed, I will scale up the annual rainfall amount by a factor equal to the percent of missing days. Downloaded the Wilson River gage data for the 1961 - 1990 time period to match the PRISM data dates. Ran the flow data through Dr. Olivera's bflow program to figure out the amount of baseflow. After delineating the drainage area above the Wilson River gage, discovered that the cell size of the dem (elev_g7) is 98.something. Since it is a lot easier to work with a cell size of 100, I began the process to resample based on a cell size of 100 (am working with Ann Q on this). Ann suggested that I check out the two grids to make sure that they seem to match up. They seem to match fairly well, the shapes and patterns seem to match very well. I will let Ann take a look to make sure it looks OK. Finished delineating the drainage area above the Wilson River gage using the grids with 100 ft cell size. Click here to see the watershed - the blue dot is the Wilson River gage, the red dot is the radio station rain gage. Looks pretty much the same as the one delineated last week. The delineated watershed is equal to 157.6 square miles. I also resampled the precipitation grid that I got from the PRISM site to a cell size of 100 and clipped it to match the extent of the dem grid (elev_g7). Click here to see the precipitation grid.

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Week of 23 Feb

Spent Monday morning at the ARS office in Temple, TX for an overview of EPIC. Got some information on some of the different components. Any of them are going to be rather involved. Spoke with some of the modelers about what I want to do. They recommended that I use the SWAT (soil and water assessment tool) rather than EPIC. If we decided that we need better refinement for sediment loads later on, we can decide if we want to put the effort into using this. Cleaned up the Wilson River runoff data; have an excel spreadsheet with years 1961 - 90 (to match the dataes of PRISM data) with the baseflow and runoff amounts. From the precipitation grid and the radio station rainfall gage, used the infomation tool in arcview to get the longterm annual average rain at the radio station - 2213 mm or 87 in. Incidentally, I found out the the NCDC designated rain gage Tillamook 1W is synonymous with the radio station gage. However, the NCDC designated rain gage Lee's Camp is not synonymous with the South Fork gage - they are two separate gages. I did get coordinates for the South Fork gage. For each year 61 - 90, calculated a ratio of measured rainfall to long term annual (from PRISM). Then using the PRISM precip grid and the delineated watershed grid, created a grid of the mean rainfall for the watershed area. I did this using the grid command "zonalmean." Click here to see the mean rainfall grid. This legend for this grid is a bit meaningless because all of the values inside the extent of the watershed are the same value. At any rate it did give me the long term annual which is 3004.8 mm or 118 in. I also decided to look at the TBNEP coverage "tbasins" versus my delineated watershed. They match quite well. Click here to see the comparison.

Began to look at trying to find a coverage that would allow me to separate the forest area from the pasture lowland area. There is no land use/land cover file, but I could probably download that. Found a couple of possibilities. The fematveg cover does have a grass/shrub class - click here to see that coverage with only the grass/shrub showing up. The owner coverage might work - there is a classification for public non industrial - click here to see the coverage with only PNI showing up.

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As of 17 Mar

Have been doing a lot with the precipitation grids and trying to come up with rainfall/runoff grids.  Also working on burning in the streams into the dem - first try looks like I need to edit one spot so the flow goes down the Wilson River.  Right now, there is a place where one of the lowland streams basically joins up with the Wilson River in the lowater grid.  Click here to see this.  You can also look at a closeup of this situation by clicking here. Had a similar problem with the Tillamook River - removed a shortcircuit on the gridded streams (lowtrfix1).

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As of 1 Apr

Spent quite a bit of time reworking an exercise for the GIS class. Took the Exercise from last spring on non-point sources in the Mission Basin and edited it to be done completely in ArcView. Had reconfigure some of the data files and some of the scripts. To see the final product, click here. Have also been working on getting the flow of water right. I will be using this work for my GIS class Term Project. To see what I've been doing with this, check out my report page for the project. Please note that this page is a work in progress, so check on it periodically to see it grow!

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Summer Work
 
 Click here to see the first draft exercise that I wrote for the TBNEP office to demonstrate the model.

Click here to see the tables with information on fecal coliform numbers for the 5 sub-basins.  This information is based on the early Aug 1998 model.  These figures are taken from Excel spreadsheets.  The values for runoff concentration were adjusted to try to match observed fecal coliform concentrations in the rivers.

During my visit to TBNEP in August, Steve Nelson and I discussed BMPs in general and how they could be incorporated into the model.  We decided on 3 classes of BMPs that are related to the CAFOs.  They are:

• Adequate Storage - Yes/No; if a CAFO has adequate storage, it will result in some % reduction of the FC and sediment concentration in runoff.  The precentage of CAFOs that have adequate storage will be assumed to be synonymous with the percentage of CAFO land that is affected (ie, if 25% of the CAFOs have adequate storage, then it will be assumed that 25% of the CAFO land (designated as a specific land use) has that BMP applied to it.  The percent reduction multiplied by the percent assumed applied will result in an average percent reduction for the CAFO land from that BMP.

• Proper Manure Handling - This will include things such as roofing, gutters, etc.  - Again this will be a Yes/No.  There will be some % reduction in concentrations in the runoff multiplied by the % of CAFOs that are deemed to have proper manure handling that will result in a % reduction applied to the CAFO land for that BMP.

• Manure Application - This BMP will be applied a little bit differently in that each CAFO will be 'graded' - A for those CAFOs who apply properly say 90% of the time, C for those CAFOs who apply properly only 50% of the time, and F for those CAFOs who apply properly only 10% of the time.  Those percentages for grading are not fixed and should be discussed and modified as appropriate.  In addition, if the concensus is that there should be more 'grades', then there can be more.  The numbers are there merely for demonstration.  There will be percentage reductions in runoff concentration for a grade A, C, or F that are multiplied by the % of the CAFOs that get the grade.  The resulting percentages will be aggregated to come up with a percent reduction that represents manure application BMPs.

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