Water Balance for the Forgotten River Segment of

the Rio Grande/Bravo

Rebecca Teasley

May 3, 2005

Surface Water Hydrology

Outline

• Forgotten River Basin

• Data Sources

• NARR to ArcGIS

• June 1981 Rainfall Comparison

• Conclusions

The Forgotten River

Data Sources

• NCDC Rain Gages

• IMTA Rain Gages (Mexican Institute of Technology)

• IBWC Stream Gages

• NARR Evaporation & Precipitation Data

Upper Basin – 8030 km2

Lower Basin – 8550 km2

Forgotten River Basin

Stream Gages

El Paso

Ft. Quitman

Presidio

NCDC & IMTA Rain Gages

El Paso

Ft. Quitman

Presidio

NARR to GIS Methodology

Web Browser

Excel

Visual Basic

Excel

Arc Hydro Feature Class with Time Series

NARR to GIS

http://nomads.ncdc.noaa.gov:9091/dods/

http://nomads.ncdc.noaa.gov:9091/dods/NCEP_NARR-A_MONTHLY_3hr

http://nomads.ncdc.noaa.gov:9091/dods/NCEP_NARR-A_MONTHLY_3hr/197901/19790101/

Change .info to .ascii?acpc[0][0][0]

Returns the precipitation value at:

Time 0:00Z

Latitude 0.0

Longitude -220.0

NARR Domain

• Longitude: -220°E to -0.625°E  [0:586]

• Latitude: 0°N to 89.625°N  [0:240]

• Altitude: 1000 to 100  [0:29]

• Time: 00Z to 21Z01  [0:8]

.ascii?.apcp[0:7][77:86][301:308]

Returns arrays of precipitation values over the Forgotten River for all 8 time periods in

the NARR Monthly-3hr

Time Array Latitude Array Longitude ArrayNARR Variable

NARR Grid

Legend

RasterSeriesIDW: Raster_774

Value

High : 97.2265

Low : 0.000829981

NDCD/IMTA IDW Interpolation

Legend

RasterSeriesNRK: Raster_774

Value

High : 63.529

Low : 11.6391

NARR Kriging Interpolation

Lower Basin-June 1981

0

10

20

30

40

50

60

70

80

90

100

1 3 5 7 9 11 13 15 17 19 21 23 25 27 29 31 33

Subbasin

mm

/mo

nth

NCDC NARR Kriging

Upper Basin – June 1981

0.0

5.0

10.0

15.0

20.0

25.0

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

Subbasin

mm

/mo

nth

NCDC NARR Kriging

Average Precipitation

0.0

5.0

10.0

15.0

20.0

25.0

30.0

35.0

40.0

45.0

Lower Basin Upper Basin

mm

/mon

th

NCDC NARR Kriging

NCDC/IMTA NARR

Conclusions / Future Work

• Conclusions– Forgotten River is an appropriate name– More analysis of NARR and rain gage data is

needed to draw conclusions

• Future Work– Complete Monthly Water Balances for 1981

Acknowledgements

• Jon Godall• Carlos Patino• Dr. David Maidment

• My Real Estate Agent & Mortgage Broker for Helping Close on My First House Yesterday

Questions?