Temperature is a key factor for salmonid health and is an important restoration metric on the Middle Fork of the John Day River in northeast Oregon. In the past century, dredge mining, deforestation, and overgrazing have degraded stream habitat and resulted in greater daytime stream temperatures in the region. Recent...
Swelling soils cause millions of dollars of damage to buildings every year in the Unites States alone. One essential piece to understanding these soils is to understand how water moves through them. Hydraulic conductivity is a measure of how easily water flows through a soil. Currently, the most common method...
We found unexpected complexities resulting from the miscible displacement of a non-Newtonian fluid for both convergent and divergent flow as observed by displacing a miscible shear-thinning fluid (xanthan gum) in a radial Hele-Shaw cell. Such complex patterns have not been described before for either Newtonian or non- Newtonian fluids. A...
This document describes the design and deployment of a first generation water vapor density sensing unit, the HumiSense. This device is based on an open, air-filled capacitor which is part of a resonant circuit. The frequency of the resonant circuit mixed with a fixed frequency oscillator is the basis of...
The Walla Walla basin lies in an arid region of Eastern Washington and Oregon. A large portion of the area is devoted to agricultural production, relying on irrigation water diverted from the Walla Walla River and underlying aquifers occurring within Quaternary and Mio-pliocene era gravel deposits, as well as a...
Survival of ecological systems pivot on critical moments. In the arid John Day Basin of Eastern Oregon, extensive restoration of the stream and floodplain focused on supporting salmon has been ongoing for the past 20 years, but recurring short periods of extreme temperature increase and low flows result in mortality...
The Middle Fork of the John Day River (MFJD) in Northeastern Oregon contains important spawning grounds for spring Chinook and summer steelhead of the Columbia River Basin. In the summer of 2008 phase one of a river restoration project was completed which included the addition of engineered log jams (ELJs)...
Water temperature in rivers and streams is an important factor for aquatic ecosystem health. Measurement of stream temperature has traditionally been accomplished by point temperature measurements, continuous point temperature loggers, and more recently, airborne remote sensing techniques such as Forward-Looking Infrared Radar (FLIR) or Thermal Infrared Radiometry. While each of...
The Middle Fork John Day Basin in Northeastern Oregon is prime habitat for spring Chinook salmon and Steelhead trout. In 2008, a major tributary supporting rearing habitat, Big Boulder Creek, was restored to its historic mid-valley channel along a 1 km stretch of stream 800 m upstream of the mouth....
Sloping interfaces of fine over coarse porous material have been considered for use as barriers to infiltration for many years. Previous literature has developed analytical solutions for flow over such interfaces, numerical simulation of such flow, and the effects of anisotropy on the diversion capacity of such a system. In...