Info. on Magnitude

Quote:

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Originally Posted by metaldector

Unless I'm missing something the info on the discharge rate is exactly what I posted in my first post

"The only info I found on Little River for example is a discharge rate of 84.89³ ³/s ft. Not being a familiar with that rating I need your help."

I was hoping for mgd or cfs. Thanks anyway.

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Perhaps I am confused-

84.89cfs (how did you get the superscript?)
1cf=7.48052 gal = 11.35 gal/sec
86,400 sec/day = 980640 gal/day=
0.98 MGD

Is that what you are looking for? Just some basic math- if you have a lot to do, just set up an excell spreadsheet to do them en masse.

I would also suggest that if you are doing some sort of statistical analysis, a single flow number is pretty much useless, as the spring flow varies significantly based on annual rain, river levels, and other such factors. I'm not sure how the bulletins arrive at their flow numbers (I'm sure it says in there, I dont have mine in front of me) but my guess is that is either a one time flow measurement, as in most cases, there would have been only one or two sample periods, but in the more popular springs they might be an average of a small number of samples, or in the case of say, Troy or something similiar it might actually be attached to a data-logger and be a mean flow over a period of time. Just throwing that out there.

Jason

Remember that any numbers you find are "averages", since the flow changes with the river level, local rainfall, etc.

Yes, I know there are variables that become averages. Never the less, some way is used to label each spring as a 1st or 2nd or 3rd magnitude spring. As cave divers we encounter variations in flow nearly every time we dive. The difficultly I’m finding on my quest is hard numbers. Even the math provided to me in this posting doesn’t add up to those published.
By the way FW you may have over looked another factor to flow variations, water bottling companies and draw down by growing Florida communities.

I thank everyone for your efforts in assisting me.

You won't get a "hard" number; spring flow will vary everyday. Actually it will vary hour to hour due to tides, barometric pressure, river level, etc. The magnitude is based on multiple measurements over time.

Jerry

Yea- Jerry is right. Where are you going with this? Perhaps someone might be able to point you in the right direction- or perhaps you need to research a little more the sources that are telling you a spring is a certain magnitude. If it is a government agency, someone did research somewhere and got a number from somebody- they dont just pull stuff out of their butts all the time. It just comes down to finding the right original source. And there aren't that many folks actually doing the sampling sets. Most papers piggyback on either a sample set taken by a grad student, a USGS field team (or sensor), or private contractor- there just isn't enough money in doing this kind of work, so there isn't that much of it actually done. (Same reason we (okay, most of us) dont get paid for making cave maps and such.)

Jason