River Discharge Calculator

River Discharge Calculator is a user friendly program that
implements a numerical method to improve the efficiency of river discharge
measurement, proposed in the accompanying preprint submitted to the Journal of
Hydrological Engineering (ASCE), May 2016. In this work we propose a simple
computational scheme with the pragmatic purpose of augmenting the efficiency of
river discharge measurements. Observing the functional form of the velocity
profile versus depth, applying polynomial regression for each vertical, and
finally interpolating between the verticals, we arrive at a continuous approximation
for the velocity across the entire vertical section, which turns out to be
rather robust to removal of individual measurement points. In particular,
numerical data analysis shows that the number of measurements can be
significantly reduced without a significant loss of precision of the discharge
estimate. This procedure has been tested on the data obtained experimentally on
Exu, Capibaribe and Ipojuca rivers, in the state of Pernambuco, northeast of
Brazil, with different stream flow patterns demonstrating multiple local
velocity maxima on and below the surface.