Living on
campus for three years, I’ve seen really shocking instances of flooding where
areas of the sidewalk are completely avoided, and stairs look like waterfalls
and I always question why George Mason’s campus is so prone to flooding. This project interests me as it deals with
water resources. I find water resources interesting because it’s easy to see
how the smallest change in a watershed can so quickly affect peak flow.
Monitoring a watershed appeals to me because there are so many ways to find
simple solutions to issues, such as high peak flows, and apply it to all
watersheds across the board to tackle global issues, such as water shortages.
This
project relates to my long-term goals in that it introduced me to managing my
own student led research where I have to ask new questions and implement
different methodologies to try and find answers. The OSCAR program is well
designed in that it transitions undergraduate students into thinking and
conducting research like graduate students.
On a
weekly basis, I work with ArcGIS, a geographic information system that allows
me to work with high resolution data to input accurate data to model George
Mason’s reaction to flooding. When it does rain, I walk around campus using
pedestrian routes and note areas that have flooded due to lack of a drainage
system, poor ground leveling, surface overflow, etc. After collecting those
observations, as well as data from our water data information system
(mwdis.org), I enter it into ArcGIS and by the end I hope to see which areas
are more prone to flooding when it rains.
One thing
I discovered this week is how to operate certain features of ArcGIS, such as
“sink” which identifies areas of internal drainage, that will assist me in identifying
new potential areas of flooding when it’s time to conduct field observations
during rainfall events.
