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LECTURE NOTES – Urban Environmental Geography – February 10, 2010 HYDROSPHERE – Skills of an Urban Environmental Geographer.
ANNOUNCEMENTS
TODAY – is a HYDROSPHERE skills day… Water flows downhill across the land so if you can read contours of topographic maps you can figure out what water can flow to any place represented on the map… so long as it rains. Urban environmental geographers understand the hydrosphere of a city… its surface water, ground water, and how they are coupled. For surface water: Where surface water comes from. Where surface water goes. How much, how seasonal, what quality. What is a WATERSHED? What is the GRADIENT of the watershed, the PROFILE of the slopes? (Water balance… important but we won’t get there today.) For ground water: Where ground water comes from. Where ground water goes. How much, how seasonal, what quality. What is a RECHARGE AREA; and DISCHARGE area? What GRADIENTS define the groundwater regime of the watershed (Water balance… important but we won’t get there today.)
. REMINDER – GEOG3330-overarching goal is to empower by knowledge. Specifically, knowledge of urban environmental geography LINK HOME PAGE Earth Systems Approach.
Last couple weeks: ATMOSPHERE – weather and climate Now … and again later… HYDROSPHERE – quality of life; metabolism of a city
By the end of this lecture: (a) SKILLS – understood and, perhaps, mastered:
(b) KNOWLEDGE – apply water cycle concepts to Salt Lake County – Wasatch Front.
FIRST: THE KNOWLEDGE PART: An OVERVIEW of SLCounty’s hydrosphere. LINK to the SLCounty Watersheds 101 Course on ESE web site, this site. Handouts:
SECOND: THE CONTOURS / PROFILES / WATERSHEDS PART… identification of watershed divides, watersheds, drainage basins. Definitions: Watershed = area of land above a point that sends water toward that point… that sheds water. It can be a few hundred sq ft... or very large. But usually called a drainage basin if it is very large. Drainage basins usually are pretty big: a dozen sq mi to hundred of thousands of square mi. A drainage basin is ... the area drained by a water course, all of its watersheds. A drainage DIVIDE is the crest of higher terrain that divides one watershed from another. Note the confusing use of language... drainage divide
CONTOURS -- review elevation contours... topography Topography east of here, Fort Douglas for the USGS topo map site. OR add a utility to Google Earth to show topograhy. Instructions: google "google earth topographic" and select KK cool tools The easiest way is to download a free nifty app for Google Earth, called the Topographical Overlay, that will add a KMZ "layer" of official US topo maps on Google Earth. Once installed you can toggle it on or off. When on, the Topo Overlay displays the standard 7.5 minute topos as one seamless map of the country. This makes it very easy to center your interest in the middle of your custom map. (You can buy a similar service on a not-cheap set of CDs from National Geographic, but you get the same thing here for free.) For browsing, this arrangement is hard to beat. You can zoom in, or out, and scroll forever. Its major drawback is printing. I have not been able to get the displayed map to print larger than one half of a standard letter Our area of interest is the watershed of Red Butte Gardens and drainage basin of Red Butte Creek. LINK to your handout. In Google Earth, fly to Fort Douglas, UT. I want you to be able to visualize the topography as you do the exercise FIRST: circle the numbers that show values of contours. SECOND: count the number of lighter brown lines between the darker brown lines as though they were steps of a staircase. What is the contour interval between the DARK brown lines? What is the contour interval between the LIGHT brown lines? Note... maps in different terrain have different contour intervals... even on this map. Good. Breathe deeply. Trace eight of the DARK brown contour lines and one set of the LIGHT contour lines NEXT PHASE... identify the watershed of Red Butte Creek. Reminder... what is a watershed? area that drains to a point. So... point is picked for you. Next... you're going to trace out the DIVIDE that separates the watershed of. First... get a sense of the lay of the land. Where are the streams / drainages, so where are the ridges. The highest places along the ridge are contours that look like circles ringing the highest places. Ridges are like tongues that reach from highest places, with drainages along their sides. Drainages have countours that "point" up stream. Follow the crest of the ridge that separates Red Butte Creek's drainage from the drainages on the other side of each bounding ridge. Your path will cross contour lines at right angles, as though you were skiing the ridge.
Next... an overview of nearby topography. And introduction to your Assignments for inclass HW07 and instructions, today; and for a week from now HW08. THERE's a nifty tool on the web that will draw profiles in Google Maps... You'll practice by hand and then know how to use the profile tool.
GREEN SHEET put name on it and indicate at the end of class… what you want to hear more about… (1) Circle parts in green that are good… meaning they make sense, you’re okay. (2) Circle parts in red that you don’t feel make sense yet… (We’ll spend almost 3 weeks at the end of the course on these topics… for SLCounty and for each of your urban settings). |
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{Students of Geog/Envst3330 -- for powerpoints of lectures, go to your UofU WebCT / Blackboard course files } {Problems viewing this site? Please contact genevieve.atwood@geog.utah.edu} {This page modified on January 2010- Modifications will continue through Spring semester 2010} |
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