A Four-Step Guide to Accurately Calculating Surface Water Discharge
Today, a wide range of government agencies, municipalities, utility companies, and private companies need to monitor water flow in rivers, streams, and canals for a variety of reasons ranging from predicting water availability and flood events to allocating water resources and planning for future development. At a high-level, these organizations are concerned with the water flow and discharge of the surface water in a particular area. More specifically, water discharge, which is the volume of water moving through the cross section of a stream or river during a particular unit of time, is typically computed by multiplying the area of water in a channel cross section by the average velocity of the water in that cross section.
