« | A Gauging Station |
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We came across an Environment Agency Gauging Station today. We had gone for a walk, despite the rain. Just a quick stroll from Horningsea to Lode and back via various footpaths, byways and the old Cambridge-Fordham railway line. I've not put it into Google Maps yet but it was probably about five miles.
It's any area we've walked before but we went a slightly different way this time so we ended up walking along a footpath along Quy Water. This is the stream below the water mill at Anglesey Abbey. And there we came across this.
It's not a great photo as it was tipping down with rain at the time (I've had to use The Gimp to remove some raindrops which were glistening in the flash). There's another similar height gauge, also marked "Crest", on the downstream side just out of shot and a little shed marked "Environment Agency, Lode Gauging Station" on the side which I'm standing next to.
I speculated that it was there to measure the flow through this stream as it appeared they could read the height of the water both sides and they knew the profile of the concrete slot.
When we got home I looked it up on the Web and found I was right. There's a web page for this station, it's number 33056, here with statistics gathered from it from 1965-2003.
Apparently the station forms part of the UK National River Flow Archive which "provides stewardship for, and access to, records of over 50,000 individual years of daily and monthly river flow data, deriving from over 1300 gauging stations. This hydrological data underpins the sustainable exploitation and management of water resources and river systems in the UK."
Well there you go: I learn something new every day.
Tags: walks | Written 19/01/08 |
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