Winooski River

Much of our group's site was centered around the Winooski River, and the many specifications that we eventually discovered. We scaled the depth of the Winooski along a canoe trip that we took down to our site.

We found that the deepest part of the river, in our area, was about 10 meters (29 feet). Below is a diagram of the river's bottom from our site's point bar to the other side of the river.

This process was long and rigorous, due to the fact that we had no measuring tape that could stretch across the full width of the river. Because of this we had to tie two measuring tapes together, which provided many problems, all of which we faced. Although most of our group members got our feet wet in the Winooski, we were dismayed about fully swimming in it because of the fact that there are approximantly 70,000 cows upriver who use the Winooski as their sewer. We encountered a few of these cows, who also happen to speed up the process of erosion along the banks by trampling the edge of the river in search of food and water.

Our findings of the river are as follows. We found the velocity of the river to be about .43 meters per second. The dissolved oxygen content is about 8.60 milligrams per liter. The temperature is a whopping 19.1 degrees Celsius. The Ph was an unusual 8.1. These numbers show that it is a pretty healthy river. Luckily the acid rain doesn't affect the river as much as others. This is caused by the calcium in the bedrock. The water temperature is a usually cold Vermont water temperature. According to the accepted dissolved oxygen numbers for an area such as this it should be around 9 milligrams per liter. However, we were unable to determine the amount of nitrogen and phosphorus due to time constrictions, so we are unable to determine whether or not the river is really polluted or not. We expect it is somewhat by the cow population and the surrounding farms.

After finding the width depth and velocity of the river, we were able to calculate the volume of water that was flowing through river at our site. As our red star indicates on the above graph, from the USGS, our estimate of 2420 feet cubed per second was pretty damned close.