7/6/2017 Watershed Balance - Lesson - www.teachengineering.

org

Lesson: Watershed Balance

Contributed by: Integrated Teaching and Learning Program, College of Engineering, University of Colorado Boulder

Quick Look
Summary
Students learn about the water cycle and its key Grade Level: 11 (10-12)
components. First, they learn about the concept of Time Required: 20 minutes
a watershed and why it is important in the context Lesson Dependency : None
of engineering hydrology. Then they learn how we Subject Areas: Earth and Space
can use the theory of conservation of mass to Life Science
estimate the amount of water that enters a Physical Science
watershed (precipitation, groundwater owing in) Science and Technology
and exits a watershed (evaporation, runo ,
groundwater out). Finally, students learn about
Summary
runo and how we visualize runo in the form of
hydrographs. Learning Objectives

Engineering Connection More Like This

Engineers must be able to understand, calculate Introduction/Motivation

and graph water runo for many reasons, including
Figure 1. The boundaries of a watershed mark the location where all the water Background
ood control and management, water pumping,
outlets into the same water source.
designing and building dams, recreational planning, Vocabulary/De nitions
and probability and statistics concerning future
ood scenarios. These skills are particularly useful for civil engineers involved in modeling hydrological processes and Associated Activities
studying water resource management for the bene t of human communities and natural ecosystems.
Assessment

Learning Objectives Comments

After this lesson, students should be able to:

Describe the main components of the water cycle.

Explain the types of data displayed in a runo hydrograph.
Calculate the regional water balance equation using conservation of mass.
Estimate the amount of runo leaving a watershed using the regional water balance equation.

Educational Standards
Next Generation Science Standards: Science
Common Core State Standards: Math
International Technology and Engineering Educators Association: Technology
Colorado: Math
Colorado: Science
Suggest an alignment not listed above

Introduction/Motivation
Today we are going to learn about the hydrological cycle. What is hydrology? (Answer: Hydrology is the scienti c study of
the distribution and quality of water on Earth.) We also call this the water cycle. Let's spend ve minutes and do a think-pair-
share. (Think-pair-share activities pose a question to students that they must consider alone and then discuss with a
neighbor or two before settling on a nal answer. Follow the group discussion "sharing" with a larger classroom discussion.)
With a partner next to you, imagine a lone molecule of water in your backyard and think about where that molecule of
water could go. Think of this scenario as you write down all the steps to the water cycle you can think of.

(After about ve minutes.) Now, as a class, let's see if we can re-create the water cycle on the board. (On the classroom
board, diagram the water cycle one of two ways, either similar to Figure 2 for beginner-level students, incorporating clouds,
mountains, lakes, rivers, trees and other land features to help them visualize the real-world components of the water cycle,
or similar to Figure 3 for more advanced students, which illustrates the water cycle in the form of a ow diagram, as a
system of storages: atmosphere, land, oceans.) Looking at the water cycle, how does water move from the atmosphere to
the ocean? (Answer: Precipitation.) How does water move from the oceans into the atmosphere? (Answer: Evaporation.)
How does water move from land to the ocean? (Answer: Runo or groundwater.)

Figure 2. The main components of the Earth's water cycle.

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Figure 3. The water cycle diagrammed as a system

of storages between the atmosphere, land and
oceans.

Often in hydrology, we talk about the hydrology of a watershed. A watershed is an area or region that is drained by a
common river system. (Show students the Figure 1 watershed, or a similar image). In this drawing (Figure 1), all of the water
that falls within the yellow dashed lines theoretically drains through the same outlet point on the main river downstream.

The San Pablo Creek watershed east of San Francisco, CA.

Within our watershed, water exists as precipitation, surface water (or runo ), groundwater (below ground) and evaporation.
Assuming our watershed is a closed system, we can apply the principle of conservation of mass to our watershed to come
up with an equation that tracks how much water is in each of these storages. What is conservation of mass? (Answer: A
fundamental theory stating that for any closed system, mass is conserved over time.) According to the conservation of
mass:

What are the inputs of water into our watershed? (Answer: Precipitation and any groundwater owing in.) What are the
outputs? (Answer: Runo , evaporation and any groundwater owing out.) Let's substitute this information into Equation 1.

Where, P equals precipitation, GW equals groundwater, E equals evaporation, and Q equals runo . Equation 2 is known as
the regional water balance equation. (Essentially, Equation 2 is a more speci c version of Equation 1, because it de nes the
types of water inputs and outputs in a system.) We can generally assume, based on the way we de ned a watershed, that
the groundwater change is negligible. Also, over very long time periods (greater than 10 years), we can also assume there is
no storage in the system. Conveniently, this gives us a simpli ed way to estimate the amount of runo we could expect
given a certain amount of precipitation and evaporation.

Figure 4. An example event hydrograph that

occurs over a short period of time.

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After it rains, water can in ltrate into the ground and replenish our groundwater supply, or it can evaporate, returning to
the atmosphere. Some amount of the water ows into rivers and streams and discharges into oceans or reservoirs. We call
it runo because it "runs o " the land. Most runo starts in streams, ows into rivers and eventually empties into the
ocean. Why is runo important to a community? (Answers: For people to use as a drinking water source, irrigation source,
etc.) Why is runo important to plants and animals? (Answers: It keeps them alive and healthy. It provides habitat for
aquatic freshwater organisms.) Why would estimating the amount of runo be important for engineers? (Possible answers:
For engineering purposes such as ood management, hydropower applications, dam design, water resource/supply
management, etc.)

If it rains a lot, there will be a lot of runo . If the amount of runo is too much for a riverbed to carry, then water rises up
over the riverbanks and creates a ood.

We visualize runo by using hydrographs. Think about the word hydrographwhat do you think this would look like? On a
hydrograph, we keep time on the x-axis and stream ow on the y-axis. (Show students the example hydrographs in Figures 4
and 5.) Look as these examples of an event hydrograph and an annual hydrograph. An event hydrograph is for a single
storm event, while an annual hydrograph plots stream ow over the course of a year or multiple years.

Figure 5. An example annual hydrograph. This chart shows the runo (average stream ow for each
day, in cfs) at a California dam gage station over four years.

Engineers must be able to understand, calculate and graph runo for many reasons such as ood control and
management, water pumping, designing and building dams, recreational planning, and probability and statistics concerning
future ood scenarios. These skills are especially useful for civil engineers involved in modeling hydrological processes and
studying water resource management.

Lesson Background and Concepts for Teachers

Hydrology is the study of water. The hydrological cycle is the movement of water through the planet's systems, that is, its
atmosphere, land and oceans. This lesson introduce these concepts and some quantitative applications to these theories.

The hydrological cycle may be visualized in a few ways. Expect most students to have a general concept of how the water
cycle is perpetuated by precipitation and evaporation, from which you can elaborate. Figure 2 is a simple visual that
provides a more physical and descriptive image of the components in the water cycle; Figure 3 is a more abstract view. The
Figure 3 ow chart of the cycle helps students think about the main storages of water (atmosphere, land and oceans) and
how they are connected.

The ow chart view of the water cycle is also a way of thinking about inputs and outputs (Equation 1). Due to the principle of
conservation of mass, we can track water through a system. For instance, if we know how much water went into a system
and how much water left, then we can calculate/estimate how much is stored in the system. This approach is important for
water resource engineering. For instance, being able to predict how much stream ow will occur in a given storm or season
is an important consideration for anyone living or building structures in oodplains. Additionally, being able to estimate
how much water is available as either surface or groundwater is important for water resource management. The math
problems in the Assessment section provide a way for students to test these ideas.

The transfer of water along the land surface is called runo . It is important for engineers to model and understand the
runo response of an area to a storm or snowmelt. Engineers answer questions such as:

How soon after a storm will runo reach a town downstream?

How much water would it take to ood a streambed?
How much water will be the peak stream ow response?

To investigate these situations, engineers create and analyze hydrographsa type of graph that plots stream ow data.
Annual hydrographs show how stream ow changes throughout the year. We typically see stream ow peaks in the spring
and early summer months when warmer weather accelerates snow melt. Looking at many years of data, smaller
stream ows at usually peak times can indicate drought years, when winter snowpack or rainfall was lighter than usual,
impacting the downstream availability of water for drinking water, irrigation and recreation. Engineers also create and
examine event hydrographs, which span a much shorter period of time than a year, often minutes or hours. Event
hydrographs show stream response to certain level storms. If it rains for an hour and a stream gage (a monitoring
instrument) collects data a mile downstream, an event hydrograph can be created by plotting the streams response to that
storm at that gage point.

Vocabulary/De nitions
annual hydrograph: A type of hydrograph that plots the annual or monthly stream ow.
conservation of mass: A theory that states that mass is neither created nor destroyed. We use the concept of conservation
of mass to keep track of the water in a given closed system, such as a watershed.
evaporation: When water changes phase from liquid to gas and leaves the land surface.

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event hydrograph: A type of hydrograph that plots the response to a speci c rainfall event, spanning a length of time from
minutes to days.
groundwater: Water that is naturally stored underground, beneath the surface of land, usually in the pores of soil and
rock.
hydrograph: A graph showing the rate of ow (volume/time) versus time from data collected at a speci c point in a river or
stream.
precipitation: The input of water to a land surface from the atmosphere; may be in the form of rain, snow, hail, etc.
storage: In the context of hydrology, refers to di erent stages in the water cycle. For example, water is present in storages
in the atmosphere, on land, or in the oceans.
surface water: The water that neither in ltrates nor evaporates from the land surface. Instead, it contributes to the supply
of water on the surface in the form of rivers, lakes, wetlands and oceans. In hydrology, also known as runo or discharge.
watershed: An area or region that is drained by a common river system.

Associated Activities
Flood Analysis - Students strengthen their understanding of runo hydrographs by graphing real-world stream gage
data to create di erent types of hydrographs and calculate ood frequency statistics. Using an Excel spreadsheet of
actual event, annual and peak stream ow data, they manipulate and plot the data, solve problems using equations,
and calculate return periods and probabilities, much as engineers do when investigating water resources and ood
frequency.
Floodplain Modeling - Using table top-sized river basin models made of clay and baking pans, student teams
investigate how rivers behave with di erent terrain and amounts of water, and at what point ooding occurs.
Through experimental trials, they modify the riverbeds with levees to simulate real-world scenarios. Make this sixth-
grade activity more engaging for high school students by using a large stream table (if your school has one) instead of
the disposable baking pans. See details in the Activity Scaling section.
Protecting Our City with Levees - Acting as city engineers, student teams follow the steps of the engineering design
process to design, build and test model leveesbarriers to prevent storm water from ooding a community. Made of
household materials (sand, gravel, tape, cotton balls, sponges, plastic sheets, sticks, straws), students test how well
their levees keep one side of a plastic tub from getting wet. This eighth-grade activity is easily adaptable for high
school students by increasing the challenge with modi cations to the materials used, as described in the Activity
Scaling section.

Assessment
Pre-Lesson Assessment

Pre-Quiz: Ascertain students' base understanding of the water cycle and hydrographs by asking them the following
multiple-choice questions.

Which of the following represents the movement of water from the oceans into the atmosphere? Choose from: (a)
runo , (b) precipitation, (c) evaporation. Answer: (c).
Which of the following represents the movement of water from the land surface into the oceans? Choose from (a)
runo , (b) precipitation, (c) evaporation. Answer: (a).
Which of the following represents the movement of water from the atmosphere to either the land surface or oceans?
Choose from (a) runo , (b) precipitation, (c) evaporation. Answer: (b).
A hydrograph is: ________. Choose from: (a) an instrument used to measure stream ow, (b) a map of stream gage
locations, (c) a graph that plots stream ow. Answer: (c).

Post-Introduction Assessment

Real-World Calculations: See if students comprehend the application of the principle of conservation of mass to water
resource engineering by assigning them to solve mathematically the following problems (or work through them together, as
a class). In these problems, students use the regional water balance equation to estimate the amount of runo leaving a
watershed. By thinking of a watershed's water cycle as a closed system of inputs and outputs (inputs outputs = storage),
we (and engineers) can make water estimates and predictions.

1. In a watershed that is 3.5 km2, the volume of annual precipitation was 5,000 m3 and the volume of water that was
evaporated was 400 m3. Estimate the volume of annual runo (m3). Assume that storage and groundwater ux are
negligible. Answer:

2. In a watershed that is 5 km2, annual precipitation was 20 cm and the evaporation rate was 0.01 cm/d. Estimate the
volume of annual runo (m3). Assume that storage and groundwater ux are negligible. Answer:

Lesson Summary Assessment

Discussion Questions: Before conducting the associated activity(ies), evaluate students' comprehension of the lesson
concepts through a class discussion. Example questions:

What are the primary components of the hydrological cycle (water cycle)? (Answer: Precipitation, runo /surface
water, groundwater, evaporation, transpiration between the planet's atmosphere, land and oceans.)

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How does water move from the oceans into the atmosphere? (Answer: Evaporation.)
How does water move from the land surface into the oceans? (Answer: Surface water, runo .)
How does water move from the atmosphere to either the land surface or oceans? (Answer: Precipitation.)
What is a watershed? What is a hydrograph? De ne in your own words the lesson vocabulary words.
What types of data are plotted to create a runo hydrograph? (Answer: To make a hydrograph, we use surface water
ow data collected at one location over a period of time. We plot the rate of ow in volume/time units, such as cubic
feet per second, on the y-axis, over time, on the x-axis.)
What is the di erence between an event hydrograph and an annual hydrograph? (Answer: The di erence is the time
period, short data collection for a storm event, perhaps minutes or hours, versus long data collection, perhaps years.)
What equations have we learned today and what do they describe? (Answer: We learned three equations:
conservation of mass, the regional water balance equation, and a simpli cation to the regional water balance
equation. Conservation of mass states that mass is conserved over time. The regional water balance equation is a
closed water cycle system that considers inputs and outputs of water. One simpli cation we can make is to assume
groundwater has negligible e ects, thus we use precipitation and evaporation to estimate runo .)
What do we mean by the regional water balance equation? (Answer: It's the regional closed water cycle system in
equation form: precipitation plus incoming groundwater minus the sum of leaving groundwater and runo equals
storage. It puts all together the inputs and outputs in the watershed "system.")
How do engineers apply the principle of the conservation of mass to understand watersheds? (Answer: Engineers
think of the watershed as one closed water cycle system, with inputs, outputs and storage amounts.)
For what purposes might engineers collect a watershed's stream ow data, make hydrographs and use the regional
water balance equation? (Example answers: To calculate a community's expected water needs [drinking water,
sewage treatment, recreation, irrigation of crops, parks and yards], to recommend whether water restrictions should
be put in place during droughts, to inform land owners of areas that are at risk of ooding, to design and manage
dams and reservoirs, to determine probabilities and statistics about potential ood scenarios, etc.)

Extension Activity: Have your students use what they learned and apply it to a real-world engineering problem. Pose the
following scenario to your students:

Longmont, CO, is a town that sits at an elevation of ~5,000 ft above sea level to the east of the Rocky Mountains and
north of Denver, CO. The St. Vrain Creek, which is a tributary of the South Platte River, ows right through the center
of Longmont, CO. Starting on September 9, 2013, a weather system stalled over this area of Colorado and dropped
almost 20 inches of rain over the following week. To put this in perspective, this area of Colorado generally sees 20
inches of rain over the course of an entire year. On September 12, stream ow reached 6,000 cubic feet per second!
The resulting Colorado Flood of 2013 was one of the worst recorded natural disasters the state has ever seen.
Imagine you are a Civil Engineer that works for the city of Longmont, CO and answer the following questions:

1. Describe what the event hydrograph would look like for this event. [Answer: the event hydrograph would have an x-
axis with time spanning from Sep 9 to Sep 16 and a y-axis spanning from 0 to 6,000 cfs.]
2. Describe what the annual hydrograph that spanned January 2013 December 2013 would look like. [Answer: this
would follow the general shape of the hydrograph in Figure 5 (showing increased ow during the spring/summer
months, however, in addition there would be a large peak during the Sept 9-12 period as compared to any other
ows throughout the year.]
3. As a Civil Engineer, you are tasked to develop ways for the city to be more prepared for a ooding scenario in order
to protect its citizens. What are some ideas for protecting against future ooding? [Example ansers: (1) Fix the local
oodplain map to make sure it is updated and to better ready citizens for evacuation plans, (2) Model the ow and
capacity of stormwater drainage to make sure it can handle a catastrophic event, (3) Use a computer model that will
use the ow of water upstream to estimate the ow of water at a point downstream so that we can have better
emergency alert systems that eliminate ' ash" ood situations.]

Contributors
Emily Gill, Malinda Schaefer Zarske

Copyright
2013 by Regents of the University of Colorado

Supporting Program
Integrated Teaching and Learning Program, College of Engineering, University of Colorado Boulder

Acknowledgements
This digital library content was developed by the Integrated Teaching and Learning Program under National Science
Foundation GK-12 grant no. DGE 0338326. However, these contents do not necessarily represent the policies of the
National Science Foundation, and you should not assume endorsement by the federal government.

Last modi ed: November 16, 2016

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