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.