If you haven't heard yet, New Jersey was hit hard this past weekend by a nor'easter that brought 2-5 inches of rain in many areas. Work in the water resources field makes you look at storms in a different way. I sat at my house on Saturday evening and Sunday morning, looking at hydrographs on the internet, wondering how our restoration project sites are doing, and the other places that I have been to around the area.
Hydrographs show the discharge (think: the amount of water) of a stream vs. time. Here is an example of a hydrograph from the Mulhockaway Creek from this past weekend:
The peak of the hydrograph lags behind the peak in rainfall. Where the peak is on the hydrograph (compared to the peak in rainfall), and how long the peak lasts depends on the characteristics of the watershed and the stream itself(some of which may include: slope, soil type, streambed sediment size, etc).
Hydrographs for streams that have United States Geological Survey (USGS) gauges can easily be found. If you are any of our project areas (Raritan Basin, Delaware & Raritan Canal, Manasquan), you can look up the USGS pages through
our website.
If you are interested in other areas around the country, you can visit
this USGS page and find your stream or river of interest by state.
So aside from spending time looking at hydrographs, I mentioned that we're interested in looking at our restoration site. Below is a video, recorded by our very own Rick Anthes, on Monday afternoon (3/15) at Hoffman Park in Union Township, NJ on the Mulhockaway (learn more about the Mulhockaway project
here). The area he is focused on is the floodplain interceptor, which is used to slow down water before it enters the stream during high-flow events. Hoffman Park's stream restoration took place in the summer of 2006.
We (NJWSA and Rutgers Cooperative Extension) will be hosting three rain barrel workshops in the month of August! The popularity of the Somerville workshop in June sparked quite an interest, so we have expanded our Peters Brook project to include two additional neighborhoods (in addition to the initial neighborhood in Somerville around Walck Park): a neighborhood near Elizabeth Ave Park in Raritan, and a neighborhood just off of Foothill Road in Bridgewater.
On June 10, we (along with Rutgers Cooperative Extension) held a Build-A-Barrel workshop that was targeted for a community along the Peters Brook in Somerville. The general premise behind the targeted community is that Rutgers (as well as us) are looking to quantify the effect of small best management practices--or BMPs-- (such as rain barrels and rain gardens) on stream flow. We're hoping that these BMPs will reduce the amount of water that reaches the Peters Brook, and in turn, will carry less pollutants to the waterway and reduce erosion due to high volume flows.
So we held the workshop, and about 35 people showed up, many from the targeted community, and 26 barrels were built. Nearly everyone that attended wanted at least one extra barrel, and many people walked by the park and wanted to join if we held another workshop. So, I would say that it was a success!
(This is the Peters Brook)
