Water Resources: Hydraulics and Hydrology
One incident I think about--I often think about when I think about accuracy of data--the
Weather Service had a real big water content in the snow in a particular location where
a rancher was the recorder for the snow. All the rest of the area, nothing had that big
water [content]. They couldn't figure why there was such a large precip content in the
snow in that area.
So they went out and they questioned the lady who was contracted to do the job. She was
saying she knows darn well about that information--she is very cautious and conservative
about how she did her work and careful so that she sent in the right [data]. She said,
collected the sample snow and I melted it down and I measured the water content and I got
the right answer.
It just happened that her husband was sitting in the next room listening to all this
conversation. Finally he felt guilty enough and he got up and came in and said, "Hey,
excuse me, I hear what you're talking about and you're having problems with the data."
He says, "The reason you're having problems with that is because it's my fault. He said,
"She put the containers on the stove to melt the snow. He said, "She told me as soon as
it melted to take it off the stove so she could measure it. And he says, "I forgot about
He says, "So I just dumped some water in it and she
it and the thing boiled dry.
measured the water I dumped in."
Here the Weather Service had been publishing that as an official record for some time, and
they had never been able to explain why it was so different there. But those kinds of crazy
things happen.
Q ..
Well, I would imagine when you deal with a lot of people as your data gatherers you've
got that as an error probability, too.
A
Oh yes. There is a lot of that that goes on. Well, a lot of these people are volunteers.
While they may be conscientious, they don't get enough money to really do it, if they
weren't interested in doing it on their own. I used to go out and help sign up these people
when I was in Garrison to do some of the gauge reading. We would pay them instead of
the Weather Service. They'd give the data to us and to the Weather Service. But the
Corps was paying them because we needed it to regulate our reservoirs.
Some of those people, they were really doing a lot of work for practically nothing. They
would get like a couple bucks a reading or something like that and might have to drive five
miles from their house to a gauge.
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