Water Resources: Hydraulics and Hydrology
A ..
Right. The Weather Service--then there are a lot of different agencies that got involved
in developing watershed models, runoff models. The GS developed a lot of them, and the
Weather Service developed their own. Each agency kind of wanted them for special
purposes. So they designed them to fit their own needs most.
But, actually, I guess the ones that the Weather Service developed were the ones that were
used the most in times of forecasting floods for various major points, like in the major
cities like Kansas City, New Orleans, St. Louis, and all those places where big floods took
place.
There weren't too many places where they had that kind of a connection, but there were
a few of them anyway. Like, I think, Fort Worth, the Weather Service and the Corps
were in the same building, too. Missouri River Division, they weren't in the same
building.
Q ..
The Omaha District might have been though?
A ..
I don't know.
Q ..
The District was in the Federal building downtown.
A ..
The Omaha District might have been, but the Division wasn't.
Q ..
Yes, they were way out west.
Anyway, wherever they could they tried to get as close to each other as they could so they
A
could share information. They would make dual forecasts. They would make forecasts,
and the Corps would make forecasts and they would compare them and see why they were
different and try to come up with the best answer.
That was in terms of primarily the rainfall. But in the western part of the country, they
had the snow runoff forecast made every year. The Soil Conservation Service got
involved in that quite a bit as the Weather Service. There were a lot of the big river
basins out there where they had to make those long-range forecasts, so they had reservoirs
with dual-purposes, storage served for irrigation and for flood control. So you would
draw it down in the fall and the late winter to make room for the flood.
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