Vernon
Missouri a little bit, and we`ve talked about the Mississippi, are there any of the other
systems that you'd particularly like to discuss. The kind of problems that as a hydrologist
you've had there or the characteristics of those particular river systems.
A ..
Well, of course, the Columbia River is another, the Ohio and the Columbia are two other
big problems. The North Pacific Division, Dave Rockwood, when he was up there
developed what they called the SAAR model, which was a complex runoff forecasting
model based on information on rainfall and snow melt over big basins, large basins like
the Columbia. The
drains into it as well as a lot of other big rivers.
But they developed the SAAR model for estimating flows and predicting flows. That
model was used in a lot of places around the world. In fact Dave and some of the people
that worked for him used to go to other countries and explain how the model worked and
help other people develop their own models similar to that one.
So it was one of the, I guess, one of the big early forecast models--I guess we've talked
about the forecast models before. But that was one of the ones that got a lot of early
prominence because of the size of it, the big projects that were involved--all those big
hydropower projects on the Columbia River. So that was used in their early water control
center that we talked about before.
They got a lot of publicity on their capabilities to do that sort of thing. Turned out that
Dave was spending about as much time talking about his model to other people as he was
using it in the Columbia River. So he got a lot of publicity out of that.
The Ohio River is another serious problem. We had more navigation problems there than
flood control. Even though there are a lot of levee projects along the way, there were an
awful lot of navigation problems on the Ohio River. It seemed like every year there were
problems with ice jams and barges getting frozen in and blocking the gates, low flows, and
water quality.
Sediment and Debris
Let's see, what were some of the others--the Arkansas River, of course. It's a big
problem because of the sediment down there. [There was] a lot of sediment going down
the Arkansas River and trying to design flood control works and navigation works on the
Arkansas River was a big problem because how did you handle all this sediment. So there
was a lot of study and research done on how to design projects so that they would take
care of the sediment in a manner that you could live with and still make the projects work
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